More proof of why Matt Wells was one of the worst Texas Tech head coaches ever

When current Kansas State offensive coordinator and former Utah State head coach Matt Wells was hired to replace Kliff Kingsbury as Texas Tech head football coach late in 2018, no Red Raider fan actually wanted him to be the man to take over in Lubbock. That's because, until his name surfaced as a strong candidate to land the job, almost no one in Raiderland had ever heard of the then-Utah State head coach.

However, the one person in West Texas who was a Wells fan, Texas Tech Athletic Director Kirby Hocutt, was the only person who mattered. Thus, in a bold but ultimately ill-fated move, Hocutt went against the wants of his fan base and donors and hired Wells to resurrect the Red Raider football program.

As many predicted, the move was a catastrophic failure. From 2019 through the middle of the 2021 season, Wells managed to go just 13-17 overall and 7-16 in Big 12 play at Tech.

What's more, his .433 winning percentage is the third-worst of any head coach in Tech history and the second-worst of any Tech head coach to lead the program for multiple years. Thus, when he was fired after eight games of the 2021 season, it was cause for celebration for many people who bleed Scarlet and Black.

There were those of us who said all along that Wells was an awful hire and then there were those who came to that realization over the course of his tenure. Now, no one would argue that his reign was anything but a colossal waste of time and arguably Hocutt's worst move as Tech's A.D.

So why bring all of this up again some three years later? Well, this week, a new story from Wells' time at Tech came to light and it is so unbelievable that it has to be discussed.

This week, Carter Yates of Dave Campbell's Texas Football published a story on current Red Raider tight end Jalin Conyers and his long road from playing high school football in Gruver, Texas (north of Amarillo) to spending his final college season at Texas Tech. In that piece, he shares a story about Wells' initial recruitment of Conyers back in 2019 and it is shocking.

From the article, "Texas Tech head coach Matt Wells gave Conyers his first college offer on Feb. 23, 2019, just two months after his breakout state championship game. He'd wanted this opportunity since going to Texas Tech games with Pops. He tried to commit on the spot.

"But Wells wouldn't take it.

"Wells knew Conyers was about to blow up on the recruiting trail and wanted him to enjoy the experience. He suggested Conyers take all the visits he could, and if he still wanted to attend Texas Tech after, they'd take his commitment."

Let that sink in. A player who had grown up dreaming about being a Red Raider wanted to commit to Texas Tech but Wells told him to keep exploring his options. It is hard to fathom any other college coach in the country operating that way.

It wasn't like Conyers was some marginal recruit either. He was a four-star prospect and the No. 4 tight end in the nation in his class.

To put that in perspective, know that Conyers was rated the No. 190 player in America by 247Sports.com's composite rankings that year. The highest-ranked player Wells would sign in the class of 2019 was Landon Peterson, a three-star offensive lineman and the No. 780 player in the country according to the 247Sports composite rankings.

In other words, Wells told one of the top 200 players in America, one who would have been by leaps and bounds the bell cow of his first recruiting class, to go flirt with other schools before committing to Texas Tech. Of course, the move backfired as Conyers would eventually sign with Oklahoma.

While Conyers would finally come home to Texas Tech for his last year of college football, the pain is in the fact that Tech could have had him for five seasons instead of just one. Over that time, he would have been the best tight end on campus as he is this year.

But because of Wells' ineptitude as a recruiter, Conyers will have spent the majority of his college career in other ports of call rather than in Lubbock where he wanted to be all along. Wells' move would be akin to a car dealer telling a customer to go to other dealerships to look for a better offer after the customer had already said "I'll take it".

Or imagine a single man telling a supermodel that he won't accept her proposal until she dates other men and then decides that she still wants to marry him. Those are ridiculous scenarios but yet they are akin to what Wells did with Conyers.

Perhaps that's why Wells was such an awful recruiter. He signed three classes while at Tech and they ranked 65th, 48th, and 55th in the nation respectively. What's more, none of those classes ranked higher than seventh in the Big 12, which had only ten members at the time.

This is why we should all appreciate Joey McGuire as Texas Tech's head coach. Does he have his flaws? Sure. His teams struggle on the road, he is prone to exaggeration at times, and he is yet to win big in Lubbock.

However, he isn't incompetent like his predecessor was. McGuire is a strong recruiter and he's leaps and bounds better than Wells as a head coach.

Still, for those of us who never wanted Matt Wells as Texas Tech's head coach, this story is a reminder of how mismanaged this football program has been for years and it brings back those feelings of bitterness toward not only Wells but Hocutt as well.

If only Hocutt would have told Wells to explore all of his options and talk to other universities about their head coaching positions before taking Wells' acceptance of the Red Raider job back in 2019. Of course, that assumes that Wells would have had other options at the time, which likely wasn't the case. Now, the only good thing that Tech fans can say about Wells is that he's Kansas State's problem and not ours.