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Texas Tech football: 4-star safety commits to Red Raiders

By Matthew Conner

LUBBOCK, TEXAS - NOVEMBER 09: New football head coach Joey McGuire of the Texas Tech Red Raiders addresses the crowd during halftime of the college basketball game against the North Florida Ospreys at United Supermarkets Arena on November 09, 2021 in Lubbock, Texas. (Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images)
LUBBOCK, TEXAS - NOVEMBER 09: New football head coach Joey McGuire of the Texas Tech Red Raiders addresses the crowd during halftime of the college basketball game against the North Florida Ospreys at United Supermarkets Arena on November 09, 2021 in Lubbock, Texas. (Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images) /
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For new Texas Tech football head coach Joey McGuire to turn around his program’s fortunes, he is going to have to seriously upgrade the talent level in his locker room.  So far, he’s off to a flying start in that endeavor.

Sunday, McGuire and his staff received yet another big-time commitment in the class of 2023.  And the best part about it is that the newest Red Raider pledge plays defense.

Brenden Jordan, a 6-foot, 185-pound safety from Mansfield, Texas verbally committed to the Red Raiders becoming the 11th player in Tech’s 2023 class.  And according to the scouting services, he is one of the best players in the nation.

Rated by 247Sports.com’s composite rankings as a 4-star player and the No. 182 prospect in the country, Jordan becomes the second-highest ranked player currently committed to Tech for 2023.  The only Tech commit ahead of him in the rankings is Isaiah Crawford, a 4-star edge rusher from Post, Texas who sits at No. 141 nationally in the 247Sports rankings.

Meanwhile, McGuire is building quite the class in the current recruiting cycle.  According to 247Sports, Tech’s current recruiting haul is the sixth-best in the nation and second-best in the Big 12.  That’s a massive improvement for a program that has not had a recruiting class ranked higher than No. 43 in the nation since 2016.

https://twitter.com/BrendenJordan4/status/1492891344683024387?s=20&t=OsArOehsQ-fXS3ALg8rOiA

McGuire was always supposed to be able to recruit.  As a legendary former high school coach in Texas, he is widely regarded as a hero to the thousands of high school coaches in the state who aspire to follow his career path from the high school ranks to leading a Big 12 program.  Also, his magnetic personality and continued support of the Texas High School Coaches Association have kept open doors across the state as he tries to resurrect what has been a dreadful aspect of the Texas Tech football program, recruiting high school talent.

It’s refreshing to see Tech get back into the practice of building its program around high school players after seeming to stray away from that critical component of roster supplementation during the Matt Wells era.  McGuire’s predecessor seemed to be more interested in quick fixes that could potentially come via the transfer portal as he brought in classes that were almost as heavily geared towards one or two-year stop-gap transfers as they were towards high school players that the program could see develop and play for three or four years.

But while McGuire hasn’t shut the door on transfers (he’s already got eight players from the portal joining his program in 2022), he is going the more traditional route when it comes to building his program and that’s what Texas Tech needed to get back to.  And adding players of Jordan’s caliber is a huge boost.  That ability to land top high school talent was one of the biggest reasons McGuire was able to get the Texas Tech job last fall and already, he’s proving to be a better recruiter than any Texas Tech football coach in the past decade…not that that is a high bar to clear.

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