Red Raider Gridiron: Wrapping Up Arkansas (Not Literally)

Bye Week. As you all know, Texas Tech doesn't play this weekend, but they do play Oklahoma St. on Thursday on ESPN.  So yes, this should be a long week.  This also means that we might not be doing our regularly scheduled posts this week, especially for me and the weekly preview.  As soon as I get a schedule ironed out, I'll let you know. I honestly forgot that I needed to figure this out until last night because we're humans and we need schedules.

Recapping the Game Elsewhere. I don't have a chance to get to all of the articles from the LAJ and have been spending Monday morning going back through them.

* I'll get to the easy one, which is the notebook from yesterday and I heard Kingsbury mention this and noticed this through the game, but I didn't talk about it after the game, but James Polk got the start, while Dominique Robertson didn't suit up this week.  Alfredo Morales started for Baylen Brown at left guard this week.  One other note, is that this is the second week in a row that one of the team captains, Davis Webb last week and Kenny Williams this week, received an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.  Williams looked to push back after the whistle against an offensive line and then if I recall, it caught defensive coordinator Matt Wallerstedt saying, "Kenny. Don't do that shit".

* Williams also writes about how the defensive line has been a long time making, and has this excerpt:

And let's give some acknowledgement here to Spike Dykes, who recruited Reagor, Kocurek and Flugence out of Texas high schools. Spike gets unfairly knocked, even in his own precincts, for signing tough, try-hard guys from close to home. Not to get overly provincial, but some of those guys from close to home have produced more than supposed big fish from out of state.

Mike Leach and Tommy Tuberville didn't make Texas high schools a high enough priority, and the program's been suffering for it ever since.

Now the Red Raiders have been backed into cutting corners - if not every year, at least regularly - with quick-fix junior-college players. Trouble is, many of those players don't really settle in and get the hang of the Big 12 until year two.

Before anyone claims that Williams is an awful writer for mentioning Tuberville and Leach in the same breath, the more I've worked through the last few years, the more I think that Williams really liked Leach, and if I had to guess, doesn't have a problem with him. Don seems to be indifferent about coaches as he's seen them come and go.  Anyway, Williams point is more to do with how Leach relied on JUCO guys and Tuberville relied on similar guys and now we're seeing the result of that.  I mentioned this before the season, which is that the JUCO guys usually take a full year to figure things out and then there's only one quality year to get out of these guys.  That's pretty standard and that looks to be the case this year too.

Game Photos. Some terrific photos from our friend, TTURed at Totally Texas Tech from the game.  I do love those uniforms and I love that logo.  It may not be a popular opinion, but I love the old double-t logo better than the current logo because I'm not a huge fan of the bevel and there's something really simplistic about the simple double-t.

Miscellaneous. I am sure you might not want to read everyone's Big 12 power poll, but here goes:  FoxSports David Ubben, the Dallas Morning News, and the San Antonio Express-News . . . speaking of Ubben, had it not been for Kansas, Texas Tech would have earned the worst performance this week in his weekly "best and worst" . . . I'm probably being way too critical here, but the LAJ's Nick Talbot has two editorial sort of articles, the first one is about how the Arkansas running backs did the hard work and the Arkansas punter was well-rested and there were over 20 single-sentence paragraphs and I do not understand the single-sentence paragraph.  Also from Talbot is about how Kingsbury needs to start earning his contract and that also has over 20 single-sentence paragraphs. As a reader, this annoys me, but I don't know if this just me . . .