Texas Tech basketball: Trying to make sense of the Red Raiders’ woes

Is the golden era of Texas Tech basketball already over?  Or, are this year’s struggles just an anomaly?

Those are the questions that Red Raider fans are grappling with after Saturday’s overtime loss to Oklahoma left Mark Adams’ team at 0-3 in Big 12 play.

The picture is bleak right now for the Red Raiders.  Facing a week that sends them on the road for two tough tests, at Iowa State, and at Texas, this struggling team is staring down the barrel of an 0-5 start to league play before they even have the chance to play on their home court again.

What’s more, life doesn’t get any easier when Tech finally does return to United Supermarkets Arena as that opponent will be Baylor, a team that is also 0-3 in league play at the moment but one which is more talented on paper than the Red Raiders are.  After that, a trip to Morgantown, West Virginia awaits, a place where Tech has won only twice in program history.

Of course, the health of the team is also adding reasons for alarm.  Following the loss to the Sooners, Adams said that none of the three players who missed Saturday’s game, Daniel Batcho, Pop Isaacs, and KJ Allen, are likely to play Tuesday against the Cyclones.

While struggles like this aren’t uncharted territory for this program, they are unsettling for a program that has had as much success as this one has over the past several years.  Since the final year of the Tubby Smith era (following the 2015-16 regular season) the Red Raiders have endured only seven losing streaks of three or more games.  What’s more, none of the six previous streaks exceeded four games.

Also, if this team doesn’t have a significant and improbable turnaround over the next two months, this will be the first time Tech has missed the NCAA Tournament since 2017, Chris Beard’s first year on the job in Lubbock.

As one may expect, there’s been quite a bit of frustration expressed by the fan base following the loss to OU.  Even with all the missing pieces, that was a game that the Red Raiders should have won but yet another late-game failure proved to be this team’s downfall as Tech allowed OU to score on its final possession of regulation and then failed to respond with a bucket of their own.

In the aftermath of that disappointing loss, the range of emotions from the fan base has extended from blind rage to apathy.  However, virtually no one feels pleased with where things stand as we enter the second week of the new year.  And though the season still has 15 more conference games and the conference tournament left to go, it feels as if Texas Tech basketball might be at a tipping point already, something that no one expected in just the second year of Adams’ tenure.

So how did we get here and who should bear the brunt of the blame?  Let’s take stock of why the Red Raiders are struggling and what might be done about it, both in the immediate and in the long term.