If you have Patrick Mahomes as your quarterback, you have just about everything truly necessary for your team to go out and have at least a moderately successful season. And yet, as Texas Tech Red Raider fans saw back in 2016, somehow, some way, Kliff Kingsbury’s team wasn’t able to make it to a bowl game in Mahomes’ final season in Lubbock.
And that is such a shame.
We’re talking about one of the most productive offenses in the country (as well as one of the most impressive offenses that Texas Tech has seen since 2000) and the Red Raiders still couldn’t win at minimum six games that year.
That’s a problem! A huge problem. And we’ll talk more about that problem in a bit, but now let’s focus on just how impressive that offense was. Because it was incredible.
Texas Tech football history: Kliff Kingsbury truly wasted a magnificent Texas Tech offense and failed to make a bowl in 2016
This is a team that managed to average 43.7 points per game. That’s good for No. 5 in the country in 2016, which is really good! I mean, Kingsbury, to his credit, designed a really successful offense. This group averaged 567 total yards of offense per game.
Through the air, Mahomes managed to throw for 421 yards per game. While completing 65.7 percent of his 591 passes, Mahomes threw 41 touchdowns against just 10 interceptions. But Mahomes wasn’t just moving the ball through the air, he also picked up 260 rushing yards (including sacks) and happened to score a dozen rushing touchdowns in 2016.
While it’s certainly easy to look at those numbers and assume that this was a bit of a one man sort of show situation, Mahomes wasn’t alone in this offense. He was able to connect with Jonathan Giles for 69 receptions and 1158 receiving yards to go with 13 touchdowns.
And yeah. This group didn’t make a bowl game. That’s not great. But the offense was! It certainly was impressive!
I have a philosophy of “if you can’t be good, you should be exciting or entertaining.” And this Texas Tech team accomplished that to some degree. The problem is that the Red Raiders had seen this from Kingsbury-coached teams a few too many times.