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Texas Tech Red Raider Notes for 09-05-2007

By Seth C

DTN News:

I worked overtime yesterday as I posted pictures from Monday's thrashing of SMU as well as the game review. Tonight I'm going to work on the Big 12 Roundtable for this week and then finish my preview of UTEP.

Texas Tech Football:

The LAJ's Don Williams has a follow-up article to the game and focuses on the play of receivers Danny Amendola and Michael Crabtree. Coach Leach on the play of his senior receiver, Amendola:

"He was a guy that really didn't take any starting up," Leach said. "He was alert and ready to go from the beginning.

"The thing I like about him is he wants the ball every play. He clearly was not happy when we told him we were going to play other guys, that he had to sit down. He wants the ball every time, whether he's double covered or not."

Don reinforces the idea that Amendola's increase in production is probably directly related to a position change from the "H" to "Y" receiver position. Amendola reinforces what I assumed in my game review, that the offense simply took what the defense was giving them:

"They did a good job dropping their linebackers back," he said. "We had a lot of underneath passes. That goes along with the game. We got a lot of routes over the middle, and we've got to catch them."

Everyone is talking about the potential that Michael Crabtree has to break every conceivable record at Texas Tech. Coach Leach on Crabtree's performance:

"Early on, there were a few times where we wanted him to turn and go straight upfield and he's dancing around, stuff like that,'' Leach said. "To his credit, I thought he got better and better as the game went on. We didn't think any of these guys would be perfect, but it was our hope that they'd improve, and he did."

One other interesting thing to note here is Crabtree's short touchdowns. This may be something to watch for over the course of the season, but I wonder if the coaching staff feels like Crabtree can dominate any one defensive back around the goal-line which is why they just drilled the ball to Crabtree. Let's watch for this over the next game or two and then let's see if the defense adjusts, which will open up someone else.

I think it's great that other writers love Coach Leach as much as we (we being Red Raiders) do, but SAEN's Tim Griffin emailed me after the game to make sure and check out his game story for the Coach Leach's quote (it's in blockquote's in yesterday's notes) on calling the timeout while up 42-6. Tim asked the question and Leach gave the answer:

"We played good up to that point and we didn't want them to score," Leach said, as he detailed his finger-pointing harangue to his team. "It would be kind of like in an article you wrote and did a good job of it for the first two-thirds of it and then misspelled a bunch of words at the end. We didn't want to have any misspellings."

Ryan Hyatt from the Williams and Hyatt Show blog has a nice write-up on yesterday's game.

Hat-tip to Todd Davis of the DMN College Blog, for the the television schedules for the coaches shows today. Red Raider football comes on at 2:00 p.m. today.

Big 12 Football:

DMN's Chip Brown is reporting that the Big 12 is down to 2 finalists for the commissioner position: Dan Beebe and Jack Swarbrick.

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