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Sunday Morning Notes

By Seth C

Texas Tech Football

FWST's Wendell Barnhouse writes an article today abou how Texas Tech and A&M should play in Jerry's new Cowboys stadium. The interesting thing here is that Barnhouse actually provides some numbers. I think most Tech fans, myself included, wanted the numbers to be right, otherwise Tech might be better off passing. Barnhouse notes that the money, to each team, is in the $4million to $5 million dollar range.

Money. Big money. Lots of big money. Tech-A&M in Arlington could earn between $4 million and $5 million for each team. That's more than either school would bank playing the game at home.

I assume that this is the best case scenario, in other words, assuming that there's a sell-out, etc. Barnhouse also points out that because A&M and Texas play at Lubbock every other year, this would mean that Tech would move one of its two biggest games away from Lubbock:

Despite the financial windfall and other benefits, the idea of "losing" a Big 12 home game to the Metroplex can make an athletic director unpopular (at best), unemployed (at worst).

A&M's visit every other year is The Big Game in Lubbock. In years when the Aggies play at Tech, the Red Raiders play at Texas. So moving A&M to the Metroplex would leave Lubbock without a visit from the in-state Big Boys once every two years.

The pressure from West Texas Red Raiders fans plus the Lubbock business community makes moving the game to the Metroplex a hot-button topic. Tech's board of regents is lukewarm on the thought of moving the A&M game to the Metroplex.

Texas and OU are able to get through the year by doing this and I'd love for Tech and Lubbock to take the same stance in that Tech will be better off if the Red Raiders play A&M in Dallas.



FoxSports' Pete Fiutak previews the UTEP Minors. As stated before, this UTEP team will be in transition when they play Tech as they will be looking for replacements for Palmer and Huggins.

Texas Tech Baseball

LAJ's George Watson has an interesting article, with lots of quotes from Coach Hays, about the state of the baseball team. There's no doubt that Hays is going to focus on the pitching and Coach Hays readily admits that the process begins with pitching:

"We've got to be better, and that comes in recruiting," Hays said. "We're in a position now where we can't leave anything to chance. We've got to make a move. We know where we've got to put our money. We've got to take care of our pitching and that's No. 1. We went through a year this year with injuries and we can't let it go two years in a row."

Wow. I don't really know what I think here other than Texas Tech certainly now has a motivated head coach and he's not going to take losing lying down. Even a casual observer such as myself could tell that it was the pitching, especially the starting pitching, that was never consistent.

Watson makes a good point, that there needs to be that one dominating offensive player that carries this team through it's rough stretches when they simply just aren't scoring runs:

One thing Tech has to have, though, is leadership on the field. Too many players struggled during large stretches of the season, and no one took the team and put it on their shoulders.

Watson goes on to report that this new assistant coach will attempt to improve Tech's recruiting:

And that's why the reorganization of the coaching staff was announced just over 24 hours after the completion of the season. Hays said the new assistant coach will boost Tech's recruiting efforts in an effort to get the talent level to a point where injuries won't have such a devastating effect on the program as it did this season.

"Usually someone comes through out of the mix and that's what's happened for us when we had some of our good years," Hays said. "When Shane Wright was here, man we got short with some injuries, but we had a couple people step up. Cory Gerstner saved our year in 2004 when we had a couple bad things happen but he came out of nowhere. I thought somebody would step up this year, and it just didn't happen for us. We've got to work harder to try and not get in this situation again."

Watson is a very talented writer, go check out the entire article yourself. I certainly get the feeling that the current coaching staff may have been put on notice to start winning, or at the very least start competing.

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