The Texas Tech basketball season came to an end last Thursday and now, there is a basketball-sized hole in our sports consciousness that won’t be filled until November. But what will keep us going until the next time that the Red Raiders tip-off is the ride that was the 2021-22 campaign.
Remember, Tech was not supposed to be relevant on the national stage this year. In fact, the Red Raiders were supposed to be only a bubble team at best according to many so-called college basketball experts.
The thought was that this rebuild under Mark Adams would take more than a single season. No one believed that the first-time major conference head coach would be able to in one offseason retool a roster left decimated by defections after the departure of his predecessor.
But that’s where Adams’ experience as a long-time JUCO head coach paid huge dividends. Turnover is a constant in the JUCO ranks where the most a player will spend in a program is two seasons. Thus, in becoming one of the best JUCO head coaches of all time, Adams had to learn how to juggle a roster on the fly, a skill that is now essential in the Division-1 ranks as well given the prominence of the transfer portal in today’s landscape.
Still, that key bit of experience that Adams brought to the job was vastly overlooked by most people around the nation. That’s why Tech opened the season unranked and received only 17 votes in the preseason AP Top 25 Poll.
Thus, what Adams accomplished in his first season was impressive, to say the least. He produced just the 16th 20-win season in program history and led Tech to only its second appearance in the Big 12 Tournament Championship Game.
It was perhaps the most important season in program history given the high cotton that Tech has been walking in over the past six campaigns. This felt like a year when Tech could have faded from the national conversation amid a coaching change and returned to the land of the afterthoughts.
But instead, Adams proved that he has what it takes to keep Texas Tech basketball as part of the collective conversation when it comes to the top of the game’s hierarchy. Thus, he assuaged the fear that this program would lose all of the momentum that it had built since the final year of the Tubby Smith era (2015-16).
Sure, over the course of the season, expectations were elevated and we began to dream of another deep run in the NCAA Tournament. And no longer is a Sweet 16 birth the pinnacle of what this program has proven it can achieve making an appearance in the third round of the Big Dance far less satisfying than it would have been just six or seven years ago.
So there is some lingering disappointment with the fact that the Red Raiders couldn’t make another run to the Final Four. But the reality is that despite an earlier-than-desired exit from the tournament, this season was a rousing success.
Thus, let’s take a look at some of the reasons to celebrate the 2021-22 team and the season it put forth. And we will begin by being somewhat grudging because…well…it’s fun.