Good morning and welcome to yet another yearly edition of the Texas Tech football scholarship eligibility charts. I know you’ve missed them. If you’ve never seen them before, I’ll explain. These charts are pretty simplistic in that they are the number of scholarship years that remain with each particular player. If there is a red box on the same row as a player, that is an available redshirt year that has not been utilized. There are some players, like Desmon Smith, who never used a redshirt his freshman year, so he has a redshirt year available to him. The players that are in bold are players that I believe are scholarship players, while the ones who are not in bold I believe are walk-on players. I can’t be 100% certain about whether or not a walk-on has received a scholarship, so a lot of that is guess-work.

The other thing that I do is attempt to quantify in how good of shape the team is in terms of available years remaining. So I add up all of the black boxes and divide them by the number of players. I do that with all of the players and then I do that with just who I think are the scholarship players.

So, for example, for the defensive backs, the number is 2.25 with all of the players and 2.18 for the scholarship players. We’re going to call this number the “Scholarship-Eligibility Quotient”. This is totally made up.

This only tells part of the story though.

• Spoiler alert, the receiver Scholarship-Eligibility Quotient is 3.46 with all players and 3.33 with just scholarship players. The problem is that there are only 10 scholarship receivers, which is not a high number considering how may receivers Texas Tech plays, which will still be at least 3 for the most part. Playing this out further, if you had one scholarship receiver that had all 4 years to play, the Scholarship-Eligibility Quotient would be 4.00, which you might think is great, but with only 1 receiver that’s not great at all.
• The other item is that with a high Scholarship-Eligibility Quotient, that means that there is almost no experience, so it’s a give-and-take situation. The only two upperclassmen receivers are T.J. Vasher and Seth Collins, while the defensive backs probably really need a shot of some youth right now so that these players are ready when Davis, Frye, Addison, and Fields are graduated.
• Maybe a pretty good Scholarship-Eligibility Quotient is somewhere around 2.75. Good mix of experience and youth.
• The other nice thing about this exercise is that you tend to forget about some players, like Adam Beck who transferred to Texas Tech from Minnesota last year where he sat out all of 2018 and will be available for the 2019 season. That’s great news in my book.

I also realize that the 2019 class isn’t done yet, so this is subject to change in February. This is what we call in the business “creating content”. I’ll update the charts when the 2019 class is complete.

In any event, please enjoy.