When Joey McGuire and the Texas Tech football team face off against the West Virginia Mountaineers, we’re going to witness two teams that have been really evenly matched throughout the history of their series against each other.
This is a series that dates all the way back to a meeting in El Paso on New Year’s Day in 1938 (shoutout to the Sun Bowl!) After West Virginia was able to claim a one point win way back when during the 1938 Sun Bowl, it took quite some time for the Red Raiders and the Mountaineers to meet up once more.
In 2012, the series resumed as West Virginia made the move into the Big 12. During that 2012 matchup, the first with both of these teams in the Big 12, Texas Tech beat up on West Virginia a bit as the Red Raiders won 49-14. They then followed that up with a 37-27 win vs. WVU in Morgantown in 2013.
And then we got a string of five straight wins for the Mountaineers, which kinda stinks.
Texas Tech football history: Which team will claim a series lead as the Red Raiders face off against West Virginia in 2025?
West Virginia managed to win every game in this series from 2014 through 2018, claiming a series lead in a pretty compelling way. And how did the Red Raiders respond to that? Well, they won the next four meetings, beating West Virginia in every matchup from 2019 to 2022.
TTU and West Virginia have traded wins in the past couple of seasons and now we’re sitting at a series that is perfectly split. Seven wins for the Red Raiders. Seven wins for the Mountaineers. It’s interesting because things are pretty evenly split when it comes to home and away games as well. TTU is 4-3 when playing in Lubbock while the Red Raiders are 3-3 in Morgantown.
So yeah, we’re talking about a series that, while still pretty small in sample size, is big enough to showcase that these programs have been on basically the same level since the Mountaineers joined the conference. Will that continue going forward? I have no clue. It would be nice to see TTU get a series lead though. Let’s start there, shall we?