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The Morning Stake | 2019.08.26

The Morning Stake
Seth C

The Morning Stake | 2019.08.26

Leading Off

Game Week. It’s game week. Let’s do this.

Texas Tech Volleyball

Texas Tech Soccer

New Mexico 1, Texas Tech 0. Texas Tech had two games out West, a 5-1 win over San Diego State and last night’s loss to the Lobos. This was apparently a very rough game, 13 total fouls and lots of jersey pulling and arm pulling and a retaliation foul (as Coach Stone puts it) led to New Mexico penalty goal and that was the only goal for the night. Lots of second half chances never materialized and that’s soccer, sometimes those chances go in and it’s 5-1 and sometimes they don’t and you lose 1-0. Oral Roberts is up next on Thursday night at home.

Texas Tech Golf

Texas Tech Tennis

Petty Named Director of Tennis. I’ve been covering Texas Tech for a long time and I’ve never quite seen something like this. On Friday, Texas Tech named women’s head coach Todd Petty as the Director of Tennis, for both the men’s and women’s teams, but that he would remain the head coach for the women’s team and then also named former Texas Tech assistant Daniel Whitehead, as the men’s head coach. Whitehead played at Texas and then was an assistant coach last year, but prior to that, he was the head coach at Concordia University in Austin and an assistant coach at Houston and Rice.

I don’t know if this means that Petty will help Whitehead with the recruiting or just generally overseeing the program? I’m not sure how this will work. Whitehead obviously doesn’t have a ton of experience as a coach, just graduating college 2013.

Texas Tech Basketball

Beard Gets Engaged! Well, head coach Chris Beard asked his girlfriend, Frenship head volleyball coach Randi Trew. Congrats to Beard and Trew!

Texas Tech Football

Wells Sells. A-J Media’s Don Williams has a really nice article on head coach Matt Wells and of the articles to click on, this is the one. The most interesting part was the discussion was that athletic director Kirby Hocutt and president Lawrence Schovanec were meeting with Wells for 3 hours within 24 hours of letting Kingsbury go. Hocutt talked about what he wanted in the program and what he didn’t like about past years:

Asked in August how he responded, Hocutt said, “A winning program. It’s been a challenging decade, and we all want to see progress. We want to see this program that is so critical to our future, and one everybody associates with, emulate the success that our other programs have had. To do that, there’s some certain foundational pillars that I think are critical for success in football.

“You’ve got to play defense to have a chance to compete and win at the level we want to achieve at, and we haven’t been there. You want to see all three aspects of the game be solid, and we’ve been so heavily weighted on the offensive side of the ball, and we’ve seen the results that’s gotten us. I want a football program that is solid in all three phases, and all three phases are just as important as the other.”

Hocutt laid out a vision for a more well-rounded program, a contrast with the high-scoring offensive teams that in recent years were undone by a shortage of defense, discipline and maybe even ebbing desire at times. Hocutt used descriptions such as “tough-minded,” “disciplined” and “mentally prepared” to describe the team he wants, one that shows “determination” and “a never-give-up attitude.”

Anderson Entertains at Knights’ Dinner. A-J Media’s Don Williams writes about Donny Anderson’s appearance at the Knights of Columbus Dinner:

On Saturday, he returned to Lubbock to speak at the 60th Knights of Columbus Tech Night celebration, the annual event to fire up the Red Raiders faithful for football season. He mingled with fans and then, as darkness was falling, went on stage and told stories for nearly 20 minutes.

“I’m always impressed when I come out,” he said earlier. “I usually come out to one game (a year) and maybe two. It’s obviously grown a lot.

“But (with) the overall program, Kirby (Hocutt) has done an unbelievable job, has good coaches and if you’re good and you can recruit, you’re going to win.”

Bowman is Ready. A-J Media’s Don Williams writes about quarterback Alan Bowman’s sophomore season, and since we’ve heard a lot from offensive coordinator David Yost talk about Bowman’s accuracy, but maybe needing to work on his footwork, here’s inside receivers and tight ends coach Luke Wells discuss Bowman and that there should be no issues with the collapse lung from last year:

“The thing with Alan that he does with our guys,” Luke Wells said, “is he brings them in over the lunch hour and they watch film together. They spend a lot of time together. It’s important for Alan to get the guys in the meeting room to go over what he’s seeing and to get on the same page.

“And shoot, anytime you’ve got an accurate passer who puts it on you (the receiver) and doesn’t make you work for it, it’s a heck of a lot easier. He’s done a nice job.”

Making his situation more promising, Bowman has had no issues with the partially collapsed lung that sidelined him on two occasions last year — in the second instance, for the season. Bowman said last winter and again in August, that medical professionals told him that the two instances of the collapsed lung don’t increase his risk for a third occurrence.

Davis Looking for Spot. A-J Media’s Don Williams writes about cornerback John Davis, as his position coach Julius Brown discussed how he’s progressed:

“He’s really come along,” Tech cornerbacks coach Julius Brown said. “He had a really good spring. He kind of came out, took to coaching and now he’s right there in the fight with those other guys.

“He’s really progressed in terms of mentally picking things up. He’s really athletic. He’s a kid who competes, and so we’ve just got to continue to push the envelope in terms of getting him ready to play and play meaningful snaps.”

Season Ticket Sales Down. A-J Media’s Don Williams writes about the down season ticket sales this year, from 27,980 in 2018 to 24, 198 in 2019 with a somewhat smaller student allotment, 13, 466 last year to 13, 420 this year:

“It’s been consistent every year,” Tech athletics director Kirby Hocutt said after Tuesday’s Red Raider Club Kickoff Luncheon. “When you have a home schedule that doesn’t have Oklahoma or Texas, you see a slight dip. This year’s been no different than the previous years where we’re about 2,500 season tickets behind where we were this time last year.

“But I’ll tell you, the volume of traffic into our ticket office the past five to seven days has been extremely high, and we’re going to continue to push and there are a lot of ticket opportunities out there.

“I’m confident that when this community sees the product that they’re going to see on the field that they’ll want to come out and support this program like the Red Raider nation has for every one of our other athletic programs.”

You’re not going to believe this, but Tuberville’s first year has the season record for season tickets at 46,565 and Kliff Kingsbury’s first year was 44,002. Mike Leach looked like he was pretty much in the 40,000+/- range for the last few years of his tenure.

I’ll say this about season tickets, which a lot of you voiced opinions about how Hocutt needs to understand how the game day experience has changed and it has to be better. And I can pretty much promise you that they are desperately trying to make the game day experience as awesome as possible, but there’s only so much more that they can do and at some point, the actual experience will be the draw where people simply want to be there. The alcohol sales, I think they are continually working to better the internet situation, lowering concession costs, increased variety for concessions, etc. Those are all recent improvements and they’re the same improvements that have happened for the basketball and baseball teams.

The only difference between those teams and the football team are wins. Win and season ticket sales will be out of the roof. I think it is a pretty simple equation.

Frye is Ready. A-J Media’s Don Williams writes about Adrian Frye and how he’s ready to take on a bigger role, whatever it is and even on special teams:

Then he idolized defensive backs Patrick Peterson and Tyrann Mathieu, both of whom wore No. 7 at LSU. In addition to his DB duties, Frye could return punts this season for Tech, as the former LSU stars did.

“They didn’t just play one side of the ball,” Frye said. “They didn’t just play defense. They play special teams, too. Not everybody buys into special teams as much as some. Special teams is a big factor in football.

“Those guys did everything they could for the team, so I’m going to take that same mindset and do whatever I can for mine.”

Miscellaneous . . . via Texas Tech four players went to Spain as part of Maymester to learn about social issues within sports in Spain, those four players are jaylon Hutchings, Brayden Stringer, Quentin Yontz, and Patrick Curley . . . A-J Media’s Don Williams has a note that former Snyder quarterback Logan Greene (6-3/205) has been added to the roster, Greene is the great grandson of Sammy Baugh, and was a senior last year . . . RedRaiderSports’ Aaron Dickens dusts off the keyboard to give 10 predictions for the season for Texas Tech (some of them are Big 12 related) . . . WacoTribune’s Brice Cherry with a preview of Texas Tech from the Waco perspective (before you say it, it was actually well done and pretty balanced and mostly quotes from head coach Matt Wells) . . . AthlonSports’ Mitch Light has the top 15 games in the Big 12 with Texas Tech vs. Texas at #12 . . . Yahoo Sports Sam Cooper has preseason power rankings and Texas Tech is at #7

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