Can Joey McGuire return Texas Tech to the Mike Leach glory days? Its future depends on it
Three Texas high school football coaches were freezing their butts off in a deer blind in Concordia, Kansas, when Bob Wager told his friend Joey McGuire what people really think of him.
“You know not everyone likes you,” Wager told McGuire as their buddy, Kenny Perry, listened. “They don’t think there is any way you’re always like this. I tell them, ‘He’s always like this.’”
Maybe it’s the coffee.
“I am a big coffee guy,” McGuire said in an interview. “I’ll roll with coffee all day. I got that from my granddad. Not a coffee snob; I’ll drink it black.”
If Joey McGuire has an OFF switch, it doesn’t work. Or he broke it.
McGuire was in Dallas recently to speak at a Texas Tech event at The Rustic. Before he took the stage, he sat down to talk.
After a 30-minute conversation you can see why Texas Tech offered him the job. You can see why Texas Tech would have made him the chancellor.
You can certainly see why Matt Rhule hired him as an assistant coach at Baylor in 2017.
And you can see why any school would hire Joey McGuire.
The best salesman are born. Joey McGuire was born to sell and to coach football.
Much like TCU with Sonny Dykes, Texas Tech’s future not just as a football team but as an institution will depend on what McGuire does in Lubbock. He is Tech’s fifth head coach since Mike Leach was fired in 2009.
McGuire is the cover boy for the 2022 edition of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football Magazine.
With the future of the Big 12 and its standing in the Power 5 and the College Football Playoff uncertain, Texas Tech needs to return to the days of Leach when the Red Raiders were a nationally relevant name.
Do that, and Tech has a chance at surviving these potential changes.
This is Joey McGuire’s task.
If it works, Texas Tech University and every single Texas high school football coach wins.
McGuire, a graduate of Crowley High School and UT Arlington, has been building toward this assignment for more than 20 years.
McGuire is the former Baylor assistant who is not that far removed from his days as a Texas high school head coach.
From 2003 to 2016, McGuire was one of the most successful high school coaches in the state at Cedar Hill. He built a state-title winning power, and he could have been there for his entire career.
He had his dream job, a dream that started in the early 1990s, when he was at Crowley. Early in the 1990s, he wrote on a piece of paper, “Be a Texas high school football coach.”
After that season 2016 season, first-year Baylor coach Matt Rhule called him for an interview in Hillsboro.
“I don’t know why you are even going for an interview,” McGuire’s wife, Debbie, told him. “You’ve never been happier.”
McGuire knew his wife was right.
Talking to Rhule couldn’t hurt. By that point he had already spoken to Todd Graham at Arizona State, Tom Herman at Texas, Brett Bielma at Arkansas and David Beaty at Kansas.
One more interview meant one more relationship. By the end of the three coffee-pot breakfast/lunch, McGuire wanted to go Waco.
“If he offers me the job,” McGuire told his wife, “we’re going.”
Rhule made McGuire his tight ends coach, and he kept moving up.
Both he and UT San Antonio head coach Jeff Traylor are are model for so many Texas high school coaches.
They are the model Texas colleges want: The ex Texas high school coach who can call any coach in the state and recruit and sign Texas high school kids.
“I carry that Texas High School Coaches Association flag with pride,” he said.
This was one of his biggest points of sale when he interviewed with Texas Tech. The Tech administration believes he can bring in players.
And he is only too sure he can win at Texas Tech. It’s a place that hasn’t consistently won in the sport it worships since the first part of this century when The Pirate made Red Raiders football featured on “60 Minutes,” and known all over the country.
“The brand of football I want to bring in is the brand of football this fan base wants,” he said. “They want to be successful.
“Look, they win in every other sport. Look at the men’s basketball program under Mark Adams. The baseball team under (Tim) Tadlock. They can do the same thing in football.”
Joey McGuire means it.
It’s not an act.
This is who he is.
Texas Tech’s future depends on him.
