Texas Tech Spring Game Thoughts: The Good, Bad & Ugly

The Spring Game is in the books. Hard to glean too much since this was just a glorified scrimmage and the production quality was pretty terrible which made it hard to keep up with every play and series.

I think most of us fans jump to big conclusions when really there isn't anything to really be taken from these games or we take the wrong thing from it. A prime example is last season everyone thought Webb would destroy defensives after watching him in the spring game. Actually our defense was just that terrible and Webb wasn't close the All-American our defense made him look like he was.

Overall, I saw exactly what I wanted to see. As expected when the first teamers went at it, our offense ended up getting the better of things on the day but our defense looked good in spots. There were no official turnovers (1 int was brought back by a penalty). There were several penalties, but not an alarming amount. Individual players looked improved. A couple of examples, Justin Stockton hitting the hole and not bouncing every run outside and Rika Levi looking leaner and quicker.

So without further ado, below is my good, bad and ugly from the spring game.

Good:
1) RBs: I wish we would game plan to get the ball to our RBs 35 times a game next season. Washington and Stockton are a great 1-2 punch. Felton will be the best 3rd RB option in the conference next season. If you compare our talent at RB to WR, it is night and day. We are thin at WR from a talent perspective. They got very little separation from our DBs during the scrimmage. Looking at the RBs though, just about every time they touched the ball we were making positive plays.

2) JUCO Guys: I think Levi and McElrath look much improved. They wreaked havoc on the OL on a regular basis yesterday. It was really nice to see. Outside of those two, the defensive line didn't look bad, but didn't look great. Again hard to tell what would have played out at times if the QB can't be touched. I thought there were a handful of times we would have gotten a sack if it were a real game.

Bad:
1) Our Intermediate Passing Game: I went back and watched all of Mahomes' drives. I see a big lack of 10-20 yard passes. I see a ton of passes for less than 10 yards and a few deep shots but our QBs are not pressing that middle range. Those are the most important passes. You don't break many short passes and you don't get the opportunity to hit many deep shots. Those 10-20 yard passes give you first downs automatically and a chance to break a long play (i.e.. Grant's touchdown yesterday). I hope this is just a product of this game being no more than a scrimmage. Just to tie this back into something from my "Good" category, the two short passes we did break for long gains came from our RBs, Stockton and White.

Ugly:
1) The OL Depth: There isn't any. I fear an injury to any one of the starters and we could be in big trouble. Shimonek was working into oncoming traffic all day.

The next time we see these guys will be versus Sam Houston State on September 5th. It's going to be a long 5 months.