Texas Tech football: Five make-or-break players for 2022

With Big 12 Media Days now behind us, the true countdown to the 2022 Texas Tech football season has begun.  Thus, more and more, Red Raider fans are starting to think about the roster and what is to come this fall.

There are a handful of players who we don’t know what to expect from when the toe meets leather on Labor Day weekend.  And how those players perform will go quite a way toward telling the story of head coach Joey McGuire’s first season in Lubbock. So let’s take a look at five make-or-break players that have to come up big this fall.

Tyree Wilson

Sure, most people think they know what edge rusher Tyree Wilson is going to give the Red Raiders this season.  Lots and lots of sacks.

But the reality is that inside his 6-foot-6, 275-pound body is a whole lot more talent than he’s shown thus far as a collegiate.  If he is able to finally maximize his athletic ability and become one of the nation’s top pass rushers, he will make the Red Raider defense quite formidable.

Last season, Wilson was good but not great.  Finishing the year with seven sacks and 38 tackles, he was an All-Big 12 honorable-mention honoree. But given his size and talent, Wilson should be a first-team all-conference performer.

What he needs to show this year is consistency.  In other words, he needs to impact more games.  Last season, his seven sacks came in just five games.  What’s more, he had four games in which he didn’t register a tackle for loss and he had only one game with more than six total tackles.

Now, he’s being moved to an outside linebacker type of role in a 3-4 scheme.  That move will make getting to the quarterback and creating havoc in the backfield his primary job (not that it wasn’t in last year’s scheme but this year, Wilson will be even more of a pass-rush specialist) and he must come through because the Red Raiders have few other players who’ve proven to be capable of getting to the passer.

No other returning Red Raider had more than 3.5 sacks in 2021.  Thus, Wilson has to be a monster off the edge this season.  On a weekly basis, he should be at least impacting the game by racking up QB pressures, and more importantly, he can’t go without a sack in over half of Tech’s games.

Tech hasn’t had a player record double-digit sacks since 2013 when Pete Robertson had 13.0.  And Wilson’s 7.0 last season was the most a Red Raider has had since then.  But it just feels like there is another level that he can get to before his time as a Red Raider is up.  If Wilson becomes the truly dominant force that many believe he can be in 2022, Tech could have a surprisingly good defense this year.