Texas Tech football classics: Red Raiders stave off upset bid from A&M in ’08

Leach found a way to run up the score on the Aggies

Make no mistake, Mike Leach has always loved to stick it to Texas A&M.  And though this game didn’t turn out to be the classic Leach blowout of the Aggies, he still found a way to make the score look a little more lopsided than it was while rubbing A&M’s nose in it just for pure joy.

With Tech leading 36-25 and holding the ball with just 19 seconds to play, the game was all but put to bed when Leach called one last play.  From the 1-yard line, Tech ran a zone-read option that saw QB Graham Harrell keep the ball and waltz into the endzone, talking smack the entire way.

Perhaps loving to make the Aggies suffer even more than Leach did, Harrell had been rather vocal towards the Aggie crowd behind the Red Raider bench for most of the second half.  In fact, after an earlier Red Raider score, the television cameras caught him jawing at and waving toward the hometown faithful behind the bench.

Harrell was notorious for egging on the Aggies.  The year prior, when A&M was in Lubbock, he purposely overthrew warmup passes so that the ball would land in the Aggie band as it tried to move from the field to the stands.

For his career, Harrell averaged 422.3 yards passing and 3.3 passing TDs per game.  And in his final game against Tech’s most bitter rival, he threw for 450 yards and 3 TDs (though he did have a pair of interceptions) while also rushing for two scores.

Of course, that era was the Bowl Championship Series era of college football when rankings were partially impacted by a team’s average margin of victory so that could have been one reason Leach decided to stuff it in the endzone one last time with the game already in hand.  But there’s no question that he took delight in running up the score in College Station.  And it was fitting that Harrell’s final ever play against A&M ended in a TD run because it was not only a way for him and his head coach to run to make the score of this game look as most expected it to be but it also provided a way for him to rub A&M’s nose into the carpet one final time.