The Morning Stake | 2017.12.19

Texas Tech Baseball

Preseason All-Americans. Congrats to Steven Gingery on being the first team preseason All-Amerian and John McMillon being the second team preseason All-American! You can check out the entire teams at Collegiate Baseball.

Texas Tech Basketball

Rankings. The AP Top 25 has Texas Tech ranked 21st overall, up from 24 and is now ranked 21st in the USA Today Coaches Poll after not being ranked last week. CBS Sports’ Gary Parrish has Texas Tech 23rd, FanRagSports’ Jon Rothstein has Texas Tech 22nd, and ESPN’s Jeff Borzello has Texas Tech 21st.

Malik’s Minute. This was fun.

Texas Tech Football

Know the Foe. Tampa Bay Times’ Joey Knight previews Texas Tech:

Odds and ends: Charlie Strong won two of three against Texas Tech while coach at Texas. The Longhorns held the Red Raiders to 13 points in their 2014 triumph, but gave up 85 points and 1,147 total yards in the other two meetings (which the teams split). … Former Bulls DE Tevin Mims, the team’s defensive MVP in 2013, is a Red Raiders defensive graduate assistant. Mims hails from Round Rock, Texas, near Austin. … The Red Raiders haven’t played in Birmingham since the 1989 All-American Bowl, when they rolled past Duke, 49-21, in Steve Spurrier’s final game as Blue Devils coach (ESPN’s Chris Fowler was that game’s sideline reporter). … Early in his career, Shimonek operated his own furniture-restoration business to help offset the costs of being a collegiate walk-on.

Hot Seat. BleacherReport’s Greg Wallace writes that Texas Tech head coach Kliff Kingsbury will start the season on the hot seat and taht Texas Tech needs to make bigger defensive strides:

Kingsbury has yet to win more than four Big 12 games in a season. The Red Raiders have been consistently average—no worse than 4-8 and no better than 8-5 under his watch. To break through into the 9-10 win plateau, Tech must make defensive strides. Doing so would likely mean making the Big 12 title game to stave off his doubters for another season. Another 6-6 or 5-7 campaign could spell the end of his time in Lubbock.

Miscellaneous . . . Congrats to Mike Leach who has signed a new contract extension, 5 years and $20 million, and new money with Washington State after essentially taking the Tennessee position . . . LandGrant Gauntlet’s Daniel Ross gives out grades to all of the Big 12 teams and your Red Raiders get a . . . Via SaturdayDownSouth, South Florida has only sold 1,059 of it’s allotted 10,000 tickets to the Birmingham Bowl . . .

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