Texas Tech football ‘wins’ the offseason. When will this ‘winning’ translate into wins?
It’s just a headline on a press release, and because “both footballs” are in their highest profile portions of the season and the Dallas Cowboys are looking for another head coach, you most likely didn’t see it.
“Nation’s top transfer class arrives at Texas Tech
“Texas Tech welcomed 26 mid-year additions to campus Saturday to start the spring semester.”
Since college football is now “all about the money,” the big college team in West Texas is due for its day ... any day now.
After spending hundreds of million of dollars on facility upgrades and stadium renovations, and now on player acquisition, Texas Tech enters a calendar year with a level of expectation that comes when you invest giant piles of money.
On Tuesday, the team announced on its Instagram account that “Our 2025 journey began tonight” with its first team meeting.
Texas Tech will test the theory not whether money can buy happiness, but rather if it can buy a college football playoff team, and one of those seasons that Tech has not enjoyed since 2008. If Tech doesn’t win 10 games and contend for the Big 12 title in 2025, the next question is, “What did you spend all of that money for?”
Most people in major college athletics expect the court saga between the NCAA and the many plaintiffs suing it will end this spring; with these settlements will come a new rule book that so far is written in pencil on a wet napkin. The expectation is that this will happen in time for the 2025-26 “academic” year.
The end of the NIL era, however brief, is on the horizon. What is coming is a salary cap, revenue sharing, some structure, but until then boosters with means who want to spend it on their favorite team still can blow their money like a sailor on leave.
There are still no real rules, which has allowed Tech and others to behave like the New York Dodgers in college football free agency. If this doesn’t work ...
Since Tech’s last special season, in ‘08 under the now late Mike Leach, every major team in the state has had its moment, or moments, of national adoration:
▪ Texas reached the national title game in 2009, and, after a prolonged period of ugly, it has finished in the national semifinals each of the last two years.
▪ Texas A&M’s first season in the SEC in 2012 remains its gold standard for that league. The Aggies finished 11-2 that season, won at Alabama, defeated Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl, and had Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel.
▪ Baylor has had six 10-win seasons, with two appearances in the Sugar Bowl, as well as the Alamo Bowl, Fiesta Bowl and Cotton Bowl. In 2011, it featured the Heisman Trophy winner quarterback Robert Griffin.
(It also had a just a small “dust up” with former head coach Art Briles, the entire school and members of the administration).
▪ Houston finished 13-1 in 2015 under coach Tom Herman and defeated Florida State in the Peach Bowl.
▪ In its first season in the ACC, SMU reached the conference title game and made the college football playoffs.
▪ Of all the teams to surpass Texas Tech this century, TCU’s evolution would be the most painful, or at least irritating. The Horned Frogs were not in the Big 12 until 2012. Since joining the league, TCU has won a share of the Big 12 title, played in the conference title game twice and won a playoff game, which led to its appearance in the 2023 national title game that ended in a narrow loss to Georgia.
Tech’s high points include the presence of quarterback Patrick Mahomes destroying scoreboards, a handful of nice regular season wins and a few mid-tier bowls.
All of this success from in-state schools has every single Tech fan asking, “When do we do this?”
Head coach Joey McGuire is entering his fourth season, and he has the full support of the major voices in the Red Raiders’ community. He is 23-16 with three bowl appearances and two bowl wins.
Tech under McGuire is 4-6 against Top 25 opponents, but his first three years in Lubbock are also the best three-year stretch since the final seasons under Mike Leach, 2007 to 2009. McGuire’s signature moment remains his fourth game as Tech’s coach, a 37-34 win over Texas in Lubbock in 2022.
What he lacks are more of those nationally prominent moments that generate the attention a school that swims in the expensive power football pool craves.
He had previously said he wanted to use the transfer portal to “fill in gaps,” on his roster. This transfer class, which is ranked second nationally by both 247Sports and ESPN, suggests this is more of an overhaul of a depth chart than a gap fill.
It also suggests that Tech spent the money.
Tech has spent the money everywhere, and the Red Raiders are only too sure their day is coming now. If not, what did they spend all of this money for?
This story was originally published January 15, 2025 at 12:50 PM.
