All the pieces were in place for Texas Tech to make it a happy homecoming against Baylor. They were coming off a bye week and were hosting a team that was 0-3 in Big 12 play. Red Raiders were feeling disrespected by the lack of votes in the AP poll. With all that motivation, everyone was expecting this team to play one of its best games of the season. Instead, Joey McGuire saw his team play sloppily in all three phases of the game. As a result, Texas Tech is flat in a 59-35 defeat at the hands of the Baylor Bears.
Red Raiders Couldn’t Do Anything Special
Everything went wrong for Texas Tech today. It’s never good when special teams get their own highlight for all the wrong reasons. To make it easy, here is the laundry list of special teams failures today:
- Kickcatch interference call
- Surrendered a 73-yard punt return to the one-yard line
- They could not handle a squibbed kickoff that Baylor recovered on the Texas Tech 19-yard line
- Josh Kelly almost fumbled a punt after failing to call for a fair catch
- The opening second-half kickoff was kicked out of bounds
As ugly as the special teams effort was, things only got worse for the defense.
Could Not Stop Baylor Rushing Game
Baylor quarterback Sawyer Robertson has found himself compared with Behren Morton often. Both of them are from Lubbock with Robertson attending Coronado while Morton attended Eastland High School. Morton was offered a scholarship to play at Tech while Robertson never received an offer from his family’s favorite team. Much was made of Robertson’s return to Lubbock. But Texas Tech knew it had to keep Baylor from establishing a successful running game if they wanted to win this game. Tim DeRuyter’s defense ran into two problems on Saturday.
The first one was they could not stop Baylor on the ground. They finished for 255 yards on 33 carries and three touchdowns in the game. Those also included some explosive plays in which the front seven simply was blocked up perfectly and the running back wasn’t touched for 10 yards. With the defense struggling in that aspect, Robertson took advantage and had a career day. He was 21-for-32 passing for 274 yards and five touchdown passes. He faced zero pressure in the pocket for much of the game and made easy work of the Red Raider secondary. But they were just one part of the equation where Texas Tech fell hard in Lubbock.
Offense Looked Out Of Sync
All season, the game plan has been Tahj Time. As running back Tahj Brooks has gone, the Red Raider offense has gone. On paper, it appears that Brooks did his job. He finished the game with 125 yards on 25 carries and one touchdown. But he was bottled up for most of the day. His 31-yard touchdown run was the only game-changing-type play he made all day. It was not his fault though because the rest of the offense couldn’t get anything going. Give Baylor credit because Morton never seemed comfortable passing the ball. Oftentimes, Morton had a pretty clean to operate from and couldn’t find an open receiver because the coverage was great by Dave Aranda’s defense.
Morton finished the game with decent numbers. He threw for 286 yards on 33-for-49 passing and three touchdowns. But most of it would qualify as “empty calorie” stats. When the game was still in question, the offense struggled to find the endzone. It is even more astounding that Texas Tech dominated time of possession. The Red Raiders had the ball for almost nine more minutes than Baylor did. But that is what turnovers and poor special teams will do.
Texas Tech Fell Flat On Butt; Can They Get Back Up?
Much like the Washington State defeat, this loss could be just a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad game. Baylor was averaging 28 points coming into this game. They finished with 59. Red Raider fans have to feel extremely disappointed with this showing out of the bye week with a healthy team. How this team responds next week against a very vulnerable TCU team will say a lot about the makeup of this team and the coaching staff. With plenty of success still on the table, can the Red Raider move on quickly from a very humbling defeat to their in-state rivals?
