Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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As the shadows lengthened in the late afternoon on Saturday in Ames, Iowa, the biting cold was getting sharper by the minute. Game time was still a couple of hours away in this numbing nighttime test of wills between Texas Tech and Iowa State. Kickoff temperature would drop to 18 degrees and a wind chill of 7. And there were a number of Red Raiders, arriving at Jack Trice Stadium and walking on the grass turf. They were strutting bare-chested and doing a little hooting and...
In the beginning, there was Tyler Shough, followed by Henry Columbi, followed by Donovan Smith, followed by Shough again, followed by Smith again, followed by Behren Morton and followed by Shough again. For those trying to find the right number of pieces to the Texas Tech quarterback puzzle, it’s four quarterbacks starting seven times over the last 23 games. And to think, this was a program that once had one quarterback – Graham Harrell – starting 39 consecutive games over thr...
When it’s fourth down in the second halves of tight games, most fans will cup their hands and shout, “Go! Go!” to normally too-conservative coaches. At Texas Tech, with a head coach who seems to have overdosed on analytics, it sounds the same, but means something else: “No! No!” The Red Raiders had another fourth-quarter fade on the road Saturday at No. 7 TCU, seeing a 17-13 lead snowed under by three consecutive Frogs touchdowns before ultimately falling, 34-24, in a game th...
There’s an old dusty manual of sports sayings somewhere, and in it is this one: A team isn’t as good as its best game and isn’t as bad as its worst. That one is true, especially for a program that’s still looking to escape annual mediocrity. Two weekends ago, after rolling West Virginia, 48-10, Texas Tech fans were rubbing their hands in anticipation of a five-game winning streak and trying to mentally calculate who needs to beat who down the stretch for the Red Raiders...
There are any number of examples to illustrate the gross ineptitude and coaching malpractice of the Texas Tech defense over the last dozen years. All speak to the horror show that was a Saturday staple. There were the six different defensive coordinators in seven years, lowlighted by Matt Wallerstedt’s midseason firing in 2014, canned because his off-the-field issues were somehow worse than his on-field issues. Mike Smith, his interim replacement, later accused Wallerstedt o...
An open date for Texas Tech was a much-needed reprieve at the midpoint of the football season. Injuries, inevitable with any team, were starting to become a factor for a team lacking depth, and the gauntlet that was the five-game ultra-test is over. The Red Raiders faced five consecutive Top 25 teams at the time they played – Houston, North Carolina State, Texas, Kansas State and Oklahoma State. Tech is 3-3, with three wins at home and three losses on the road. It’s per...
He occasionally played at a time when most fans were filing out of the stadium. They didn’t care to take the time to look, to search for the details in his decisions or notice the little extra zip on his passes, the quickness as he evaded the rush and scurried out of bounds. Until Saturday, Behren Morton anonymously played when the credits rolled. The game was over one way or another. A year ago, the true freshman Texas Tech quarterback took a few snaps in a win over K...
When little kids grow up, most want to be a police officer or firefighter, maybe a cowboy. They never want to be an accountant. That’s much too dull. When the Texas Tech football program grows up, the Red Raiders should aspire to be accountants. If football programs were job titles, the Kansas State Wildcats are the accountants of the Big 12. The Wildcats have long been organized, efficient, and detailed. They are substance over style, grit over glitter. In short, they have be...
Texas Tech staggered Texas with a fourth-quarter comeback. The Red Raiders were on the verge of a win but somehow the Longhorns tied the score and now the game was in overtime. Texas got a quick touchdown. As for Tech, it was a fourth-down interception. Game over. But enough about 2020, which was a 63-56 Longhorn win. Actually, that loss is relevant – almost as much as Saturday’s 37-34 overtime win was for Tech over these same Longhorns. If the Red Raiders make one play in...
Turns out the 2022 Texas Tech football season is not a made-for-TV Disney movie after all. You know the plot – new coach is hired and excites the fan base as he instantly rescues a program mired in 12 years of mediocrity, and he does so with a raw backup quarterback after an injury to the starter, a poor offensive line and befriends the son of a single mom in his spare time. Reality is quite different. The world where credits do not roll at the end is much more calculating a...
“That’s the way to throw the football – good job!” “What are you doing? Why are you throwing it there?” “All right! Big-time scramble there!” “Don’t hold the ball! Come on, get rid of it!” On a warm Saturday afternoon, Texas Tech quarterback Donovan Smith turned fans into various likenesses of Sybil, she of the multiple personality disorder. At times, Smith could make many of the 56,271 fans stand and high-five their neighbor. At other times, he could make them shake their hea...
The opponent was Houston Baptist – the university, not a church. It was two years ago, and the delayed 2020 college football season under the cloud of COVID was tepidly beginning. This was almost ideal for Texas Tech, opening against a lower-division opponent which had been playing football for just seven years and won only five games in the previous three. What should have been an opening night stroll was anything but that. HBU rolled up a humbling 600 yards and the Red R...
We interrupt the final days of the nearly nine-month preseason coronation of Joey McGuire as head football coach at Texas Tech with one fairly sobering thought: The Red Raiders may not be very good. At least not this year. McGuire, hired on Nov. 8, has seemingly led a parade for months that Tech fans have enthusiastically jumped aboard. He’s recruiting at a level not seen in Lubbock in a long time. He’s been a goodwill ambassador wherever he’s been. He’s on the cover of Texa...
Joey McGuire was only 31. At such a young age, he had never been a head football coach. With Robert Woods resigning as head coach at Cedar Hill High School in suburban Dallas in 2002, McGuire, a Cedar Hill assistant coach, didn't look like he'd be getting one any time soon. Cedar Hill was 18-43 in the previous six seasons. The general rule is when a program is struggling and changes head coaches, a new hire is brought in, not promoted. Assistants are looked at as part of the...
The way Texas Tech fans see the latest Armageddon blast from college football is that in a few years, the Red Raiders will be either: (A) Playing UCLA on a glorious October afternoon in a Pac-12 conference game in the Rose Bowl setting with the San Gabriel mountains watching over them, or (B) Hosting Hardin-Simmons in a homecoming game before 12,500 disinterested fans in a quiet Jones Stadium with the late afternoon shadows of What Used To Be covering the turf. Uncertainty has...
As Kevin Vaughan was descending Southwest Airlines aircraft N374SW into Tucson, Arizona, just after noon on Jan. 30, the moment finally hit him - the end of the plane his family has christened, his brothers and father all together in the cockpit. It was special. "About the best word I can come up with is surreal," he said. "Pretty much from the time we picked up the plane, it was status quo - kinda like any other flight. But at the end, it got emotional. It finally hit home...
