National expert has very disappointing bowl projection for Texas Tech

As the offseason winds to a merciful close, it is time for people around the country to make their final 2024 season predictions. That means that early bowl projections are coming down the pipe. Unfortunately, not many of those have the Texas Tech football program heading to a marquee bowl game.

In fact, one of the more plugged-in college football insiders, Brett McMurphy, is picking the Red Raiders to go to a bowl game that would be a massive disappointment to most fans of the Scarlet and Black. In his 2024 preseason bowl projections, McMurphy (who writes for Action Network) sends Texas Tech to the Birmingham Bowl to face Boise State.

The only situation worse than that would be completely missing out on the postseason altogether. After all, Tech has already been to the Birmingham Bowl in recent years and it wasn't exactly a can't-miss event.

In 2017, the 6-6 Red Raiders led by Kliff Kingsbury faced off with the 9-2 South Florida Bulls coached by former Texas head coach Charlie Strong. Though the game itself was entertaining, a 38-34 USF victory that came down to the closing minutes, the overall atmosphere for the game was lacking, to say the least.

Played on a rainy day, the game drew a crowd of only around 28,000 fans. Few of those fans were Red Raiders as it seemed like only friends and family members of the players and coaches were willing to show up for this uninteresting matchup against a non-Power-5 team.

Here's hoping McMurphy's prediction of a return trip to Birmingham doesn't come to fruition this year. After all, that would mean that Tech would have had another unremarkable season in year three of the Joey McGuire era.

Though McMurphy doesn't give a prediction for the record of each team, past history indicates that teams from one of the major conferences who end up in Birmingham don't have sterling records. For instance, last season, Duke participated in that bowl game with a 7-5 record (the Blue Devils would beat Troy 17-10).

In fact, since Tech appeared in the 2017 version of that bowl game, four major conference teams (including Duke last season) have participated. The three other than the Blue Devils had records of just 6-6 in the regular season.

Thus, it seems that McMurphy isn't high on the Red Raiders in 2024. Some might say he is overcorrecting for his lofty 2023 bowl projection that had Tech meeting Alabama in the Cotton Bowl. But whatever his reason, let's hope he is off the mark again this year, just in a different way.