Tyler Shough’s history while at Texas Tech should have been a bigger concern
This offseason, we all worried in the back of our minds about Tyler Shough’s injury history. However, we pushed those concerns aside and believed that the super-senior was in for a huge season. I was certainly guilty of that.
However, leopards can’t change their spots and injury-prone players tend to sustain injuries. That second truth should have been a reason why we as a fan base should have been more cautious with our optimism.
This entire offense was supposed to be built around Shough playing the best football of his career. It was also imperative that he finally play a full season as a Red Raider.
Neither happened. The reality is that Shough has been a decent but not elite QB in college. His career completion percentage is just 62.9 and he’s never thrown for even 1,600 yards in a season.
So why did we just believe that this year was going to finally be his big breakout? Usually, if a QB is going to have an all-conference type of season, he’s going to give indications of being able to do so long before he enters his final year of college ball. Shough had never come close to that yet most of us believed the hype we heard about him all spring and summer.
Also, we believed that this was finally going to be the year he stayed healthy. That was naive of us. We should have learned that lesson from the Alan Bowman experience in 2018-2020.
Shough plays a style of football that lends itself to injuries given that he loves to run the ball. All three of his injuries at Tech have come at the end of rushing plays. So why did we think he’d escape this season unscathed? It was a stupid assumption and one that was not grounded in reality.
Before he got hurt, though, he wasn’t playing like an All-American. He was playing like an average college QB, which is what he is. So whether it was his injury history or his previous career performance, we should have expected less of Shough than we did coming into 2023.