ESPN’s Bill Connelly put together his statistical data for Texas Tech in June and I thought this was a perfect time to take a look at his work. As an aside, if you don’t follow Bill, please do. It’s great work and I really enjoy it.

SP+ Percentile Rating by Year from 1945 to 2019

Historically, this is fun to look at, but what a wild ride. I’d like for this to not be the history. There’s so much up-and-down, but maybe that’s just part of the lifecycle of a football program.

SP+ Progression

The higher the better and unfortunately, things fell off in 2009. Wonder what happened then? The slight bump in 2012 and 2013 were mere blips in the radar unfortunately.

Week-to-Week SP+ Rankings

The offensive versus defensive variance is crazy, a short time in 2016 things seemed to be headed in the right direction, but if this chart proves anything, it’s that preseason ratings mean nothing, at least for this program. You can see that entering into the 2018 season, Texas Tech was darn near even in terms of rating, but that didn’t last really all that long at all. And for a short period of time in 2019, remember when we thought the defense was something to brag about? Again, that didn’t last very long at all.

Offensive Radar 2019

The wider that the graph goes, the better that the offense is at something, and the closer it is to the center point, the worse things are. Generally speaking, the offense was really pretty good. Yards per completion wasn’t great, but I wonder if that was a symptom of playing Duffey or a trend of the offense. The Rushing SP+ wasn’t great, but I think that’s going to improve significantly this year. Generally speaking, there are things to improve upon, but it is overall pretty good.

Defensive Radar 2019

Well, there are things to improve upon. We’ve known that from a passing standpoint, the defense was abysmal. Absolutely abysmal. That’s why Kerry Cooks and Julius Brown were promptly let go in favor of Derek Jones. Yards per completion is maybe the worst in the nation and the passing downs success rate is also maybe the worst in the nation. I can sort of live with the rushing statistics, but I think that’s because the passing stats were so terrible.

2020 Forecast

This is where maybe you feel a bit better about where things might be headed. Connelly predicts 6 wins (5.8 to be specific) and the odds of getting to a bowl are 57.6%. There are 3 likely wins (UTEP, Alabama State, and Kansas), and the 4 relative toss-ups (Arizona, West Virginia, Baylor, and Kansas State) are interesting because Arizona, West Virginia, and Baylor games are at home. I’d be happy with this overall year and if all of those relative wins go Texas Tech’s way, I’d be ecstatic.