Texas Tech football: Why we should have tapped the breaks on 2023 hype

A decade-plus of struggles will take Texas Tech a while to remedy

Programs the caliber and pedigree of Texas Tech don’t just go from well over ten years of irrelevance to title contender status in two seasons.  We should have realized that heading into 2023 and adjusted our expectations accordingly.

Prior to McGuire’s arrival, Tech had managed only three winning seasons since 2013 and had not topped eight wins since 2009.  So why did we all think that in just his second year, McGuire would buck the college football trend and turn a program that has never contended for anything on the national level into a darkhorse playoff hopeful?

Just look at what it took programs of similar status in the sport to gain national relevance.  It took Mike Gundy three seasons to get Oklahoma State to nine wins despite the fact that he was taking over for the successful Les Miles.

In Waco, Art Briles didn’t get Baylor past seven wins until his fourth year.  Of course, prior to his tenure, the Bears had 12 straight losing seasons, a run that makes Tech’s recent struggles seem far less egregious.

It even took an established Gary Patterson three years to field a team with a winning Big 12 record at TCU after the Frogs joined the conference.  It was tough for him to turn a program that he had led for 11 years into an immediate Big 12 force so the same should have been expected of McGuire.

At Utah, it took Kyle Wittingham four years just to win his first Mountain West title.  Imagine how tough it would have been for him to build an immediate title contender in a Power-5 league.

It took Texas Tech a decade or more to bottom out as a program under Wells.  The fall was slow (but painful).

So it should have been reasonable to expect McGuire to need more than just one season to fix everything that has been wrong with this program since the end of the Mike Leach era.  However, most of us believed that was exactly what he did last year.

Now, we realize that the hype was misguided and that this rebuilding process is going to take longer than we initially hoped.  It takes a long time to turn around an ocean liner and that’s what McGuire is trying to do.  Let’s just hope he can do so without hitting any icebergs as his three predecessors did.