This may be the easiest post to write of the week. These are my top five areas for improvement before Texas Tech hosts Texas. And hopefully this is the last day without internet, supposed to have a service technician come out today to repair. I will be happy to get back to my normal.

1. Improve that Pass Defense. This is one of those things where ideally, the team watches the video, assesses, and then makes significant changes to the lineups. Sort of like how Kansas completely changed their offense after one game where the offense was so inefficient that they changed everything in a bye week.

That would be ideal, but that’s probably too lofty.

I mentioned after the game, which was really simplistic, that the secondary just doesn’t seem as fast as they could be. There were too many times that Houston Baptist receivers were running past Texas Tech receivers. Just lapping them. That’s FBS receivers (not that they can’t be fast) and so you can imagine what might happen with Big 12 receivers.

I hope they have humbled themselves to the point that they can take a look at things and figure out what personnel should play and why their assessments were so incorrect as they entered the HBU game. From personnel to play calls.

2. Figure Out How to Call Defenses When the Offense Goes Fast. This would also seemingly be something that Texas Tech should be able to do since they are literally practicing against an offense that likes to go fast. I cannot count the times that I thought that defense looked confused and befuddled in terms of speed of the HBU offense. Completely out of place and unsure of themselves. I don’t know if this was a situation where the defense was trying to involve a lot of players and because of the additional personnel, that the defense just wasn’t as crisp as it needed to be in terms of play-calling. And I felt like it affected not just the secondary, but there were times where the linebackers looked unsure of themselves as well.

This just has to be better. This was embarrassing to an extent, to be so out of sorts that a Houston Baptist maybe had two touchdowns as a result of the fast-play calling. The Huskies were more prepared than Texas Tech.

3. Be More Adept Calling Plays. Given a full day to consider the game, I’m increasingly frustrated by the inability to figure out what worked offensively. It took almost an entire quarter for the offense and Yost to figure out what would work. An entire third quarter that seemed futile. If I had the means (remember, no internet, maybe fixed today) I’d look it up, but I do know that the offense only scored 7 points, so even if there were yards gained, they were likely uneventful or inefficient. Yost has to be more nimble, Houston Baptist put four big boys up front and absolutely stopped SaRodorick Thompson from running the ball and it was frustrating. The good news is that Yost did figure it out, but it seemed too late.

4. Figure Out the Penalty Situation. The offensive line penalties were so frustrating and maybe this is a situation where with the lack of crowd noise, the offensive line is thrown off with the hard counts. I don’t know that this offense is good enough to pull themselves out of ditch when it comes to penalties. The days of Patrick Mahomes bailing out the offense are long gone. Be better than 13 penalties for 104 yards.

And this really applies to the defense as well, which is that Houston Baptist had five first downs through penalties on the defense. That’s five gifts and extending drives.

5. Generate a Pass Rush. Maybe this is something I need to track, which is sacks per pass attempts because actual sacks maybe isn’t indicative of actual pass rush. On Saturday, Texas Tech had 3 sacks on 51 Houston Baptist attempts, which is only pressure on one of 17 pass attempts. When a team is throwing as much as Houston Baptist is, a team has to find a way to attack the passing offense and disrupt the passing game. The secondary obviously needs help, and maybe Texas Tech was vanilla in order to save something for the Texas game, but I really didn’t see a ton of variety in how they were rushing a passer that was obviously passing the ball. And the secondary really did need the additional help, so maybe just rushing 3 was a result of the secondary needing so much help, but something has to give here and I don’t think just rushing three is going to do it so there’s going to have to be some creativity with the defense to induce some pressure.

In reviewing this, only 1, maybe 1.5 of these were about the offense, so that’s some consolation, I didn’t think the offense was that bad, especially since there were new tackles and the new tackles had zero Power Five snaps ever. Would love to hear your two cents.