In sports, people often become victims of their own success. That's certainly proving to be the case for Texas Tech head football coach Joey McGuire in 2026.
Just one year after leading the Red Raiders to the program's first Big 12 title and College Football Playoff birth, McGuire's performance is being cussed and discussed by a significant number of Texas Tech fans in the wake of last Saturday's upset loss to Cincinnati.
That's fine. It comes with the territory. It also shows just how far the program has come under his guidance.
For a noticeable swath of the Red Raider populace to be complaining about McGuire during a season in which his team is 6-1 and ranked in the top 20 in both national polls, it must mean that expectations around West Texas have been elevated since McGuire's arrival.
To understand just how low the bar was when he got here, we must remember that when McGuire was officially hired in November of 2021, Tech was coming off of six losing seasons in a row. What's more, the program almost held a parade down Broadway when it got to 7-5 in the 2021 regular season under interim head coach Sonny Cumbie, who took over midseason for the fired Matt Wells.
To suggest that Tech was at one of the lowest points in program history when McGuire arrived is not a stretch. Now, just five years later, fans are angry because Tech is no longer ranked in the top 10 and doesn't look like a playoff team. Let that sink in.
Sure, not all of the turnaround has been McGuire's doing. An unprecedented level of financial support has been pumped into Texas Tech football over the past two years.
However, McGuire must get credit for taking the new high-priced rosters built by Texas Tech General Manager James Blanchard and molding them into cohesive units capable of winning the Big 12. After all, other coaches around the nation have been handed multi-million-dollar rosters only to turn in horrible seasons (see Mike Elko at Texas A&M this year, for example).
Speaking of resources, no one should overlook or take for granted the role that McGuire has played in earning the trust of his biggest donors. After all, we should never forget the Wells era when Tech's most influential donor, Cody Campbell, hated his alma mater's head coach and openly criticized the football program's leadership while distancing himself and his bank account from the program he played for under Leach.
McGuire has come in and won the confidence of Tech's top financiers. His personality and people skills have brought harmony to Raiderland like we haven't seen in decades. Campbell's name wasn't on the field, and Dusty Womble's wasn't on the building that houses the football program until both became McGuire fans.
Yet people want to dismiss McGuire, saying that if he didn't have Campbell and Womble to finance his program, he would be floundering. The truth is that McGuire has cast a vision that his donors have bought into at an unprecedented level, and for that, Texas Tech fans should be thanking their lucky stars.
Texas Tech fans should appreciate what McGuire is doing in Lubbock
No coach in Texas Tech football history has had a better five-year run to begin his career than McGuire. Since the program joined the S.W.C. in 1960, McGuire, Spike Dykes, and Steve Sloan are the only coaches to win a conference championship. McGuire, though, is the only one to do so outright.
What's more, McGuire has the highest winning percentage (.695) of any Texas Tech coach ever. In his first four seasons, he has averaged 8.7 wins per year. Since the program started play in the S.W.C., only ten times has Tech won more than eight games in a season.
McGuire has also made his program into a Big 12 power. His conference winning percentage is .684, which dwarfs Mike Leach's (.588) and Dykes' (.587). Plus, keep in mind that McGuire's teams have to play more conference games than Leach's or Dykes' ever did.
It is funny how quickly Texas Tech fans (and sports fans in general) become spoiled. It isn't as if one amazing season, as we witnessed in 2025, means that a program has it made.
Success isn't achieved on a linear path. Rather, there are dips and spikes along the way. Even blue-blood programs seem to have fluctuations in their performance from year to year.
Before McGuire arrived, though, the spikes Tech football experienced were marginal at best. From the start of the Tommy Tuberville era to the end of the Wells disaster, Tech topped out at eight wins, a plateau the Red Raiders got to just three times from 2010-2021.
McGuire has hit that mark in all but one of his seasons on the job. On top of that, he's building something sustainable on the Caprock by recruiting at a level that this program has never seen before.
Texas Tech football is no longer acting like a poverty-stricken, underdog program. Everyone associated with the program has raised their expectations, including fans, and McGuire has spearheaded that culture change.
So when things go south on occasion, as they did a week ago against Cincinnati, McGuire is going to take some shots. But there was a time when a 6-1 start to a season would be celebrated in Lubbock almost as much as the opening of a Whataburger in the middle of the engineering key.
Now, fans are demanding McGuire be nearly perfect and for his teams to just waltz into the playoffs year after year. If that doesn't happen, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth across Lubbock. While that's not a healthy way for a fan to live life, it is a sign that McGuire has put this program on a level it has never seen before.
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