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Long-time Texas Tech committ QB Jarrett Stidham decommitted from Texas Tech last night. I haven't read any rumors or anything like that because they are to me, largely irrelevant at this time. I don't care where Stidham ends up really (assuming he follows through with his decommitment). This is most likely why some of you hate me, I'm not going to completely flip out (only over uniforms) and lose my marbles about this.
Stuff happens. It happens all of the time. The worst thing is that this leaves Texas Tech is a real bad spot for the quarterback position, but as far as I'm concerned, I think Texas Tech is in a pretty nice spot with the two quarterbacks that are returning, Patrick Mahomes and Davis Webb, and I always felt that Stidham was bound for a redshirt and believed that to be even more true the more that Mahomes continued to progress this past year. Look at the returning quarterbacks and as a result of the past two seasons, Texas Tech is sitting very well with Webb and Mahomes returning and other than Boykin and TCU has the best quarterback situation in the Big 12.
The milk is spilt so what do you do?
Well, you make sure and secure your other highly rated recruits and Texas Tech head coach Kliff Kingsbury is in Hawaii with the other highly rated recruit, DT Breiden Fehoko, making fire and eating at a luau with Lee Hays and Mike Smith.
#FAM pic.twitter.com/ksfQA9AnDQ
— Breiden Fehoko (@Fehoko_Era) December 14, 2014
Coach Kliff Trynna make a fire here in the islands! He down for the cause! https://t.co/JI0nb7uhBm
— Breiden Fehoko (@Fehoko_Era) December 14, 2014
It's crazy late in the game to earn the trust of a player and it seemed like Texas Tech shut down recruiting pretty much every other quarterback in the 2015 class. Again, I'm fine with that and up until last night, Texas Tech didn't have any reason not to believe Stidham. It showed that Kingsbury is going to be loyal to the player and trust is a huge part of this process. Given the situation revolving around West Mesquite's Chason Virgil, this would seem like a perfect opportunity to ask him if he wants to be part of this process. Virgil, 6-2/170 and a 3-star recruit who was committed to Mississippi State and was set to enroll early at MSU, but right before the Thanksgiving holiday, MSU pulled his scholarship and now you have a fairly highly rated quarterback that doesn't have a landing spot.
Hey! It just so happens that Texas Tech has an open spot in the 2015 class. The obvious tough thing here is that recruiting is about relationships and I'm guessing that there wasn't much of a relationship here, although Virgil played at West Mesquite, and it's as close as you could be to Mesquite Poteet, where Texas Tech has been recruiting players like DeAndre McNeal. The other tough sell here is that there is a dead period coming up on Monday, which means that you've got one day, today, to make contact with Virgil and hopefully let him know that he's got an incredibly opportunity here at Texas Tech. Of course, this has to be a mutual situation and I have no idea if Texas Tech is even interested, but this is one of those things where Texas Tech and Virgil are in similar situation and could greatly benefit from one another.
Other than that, the best thing to do is not over-react, which is totally contradictory to college recruiting and blogging about a college team. I think that Fehoko is as strong a leader as you'll find and Texas Tech will be fine keeping this class together. Yeah, I really believe that. Oh sure, it's a loss, without a doubt, and this is why you never pencil in a quarterback in any spot until the deal is done.
And it may turn out that Texas Tech doesn't take a quarterback now with this class. That's just going to have to be okay.
* On a personal note, sorry for not being around last night to post on this. Was at dinner with family and had my phone on silent.