Hey gang. I don’t know if any of you have any control over the news, but if you could get it to slow down just a bit that would be great. Struggling a bit to keep my head above water. Feeling like I’m up to my ass in alligators.

I’m going to go ahead and let you all know now that I’m running in an ultramarathon on Saturday, the same day as the spring game. I have no idea when I’ll be able to watch it, but I’ve been training for this son of a gun for over a year (partly because the pandemic canceled a bunch of races that I was going to run in last year) and it’s time to run. As an aside, I’m running in Cleburne at the state park, there’s apparently an 8 mile loop that I’ll run around 4 times. It looks like there will be rain, most likely mud as a result, and winds, so I’m going to seize the day on Saturday.

So add training to a new basketball coach and staff, player defections, player commitments, coach press conferences, etc. Just a bunch happening. Regardless, let’s hope that things go well on Saturday, both for me and the football team and the basketball team and anyone else.

The first commit to Chris Beard’s Mark Adams’ program is KJ Allen, a 6’6″ and 225 pound forward from East Los Angeles College who averaged 18.5 points, making 69% of his shots (nice), 9.3 rebounds, and is considered a 3-star player by Rivals and 24/7 Sports.

Allen is a big kid, full grown man if you will, so we’ll have to see how that works with Adams’ and Peery’s up-tempo offense and my guess is that Texas Tech is going to have a roster of guys that are like this, maybe a bit more lean, and will average about 20 to 25 minutes a game.

I don’t have time to update my table with who is coming and who is going this morning, but Tyreek Smith entered the transfer portal and Micah Peavy chose TCU. I don’t get Peavy choosing TCU, but I think I don’t get a lot of things. Maybe he just wanted to be close to home in Duncanville, but Jamie Dixon has been a hot mess as a basketball coach.

This is a non-transcript which is just me typing as fast as I can while the coach talks. We have the introductory press conference for assistant coach Barret Peery. I’ll be honest, Barret talks pretty quickly so keeping up was a challenge.

Tremendous opportunity to work for Coach Adams, been close to him for a number of years. Had the opportunity about a week ago, an opportunity I had to take and wanted to be here. I’m coming in at a challenging time, spent one day in the new offices and then moved to the $40 million Womble, such a great story for Coach, now being able to do it at the highest level, continue to load a roster with high level guys, going to see some guys coming out of our offices in the next couple of weeks.

I’d like to make a list of what we don’t have. I was doing a zoom tour with a young man and his coach, and his coach chimed in and said that he’s been in a lot of NBA facilities and they are not as nice as this and I agree. I think I’ll brag this up until someone beats us.

Spoke to all of the guys, got to work out with them last night, have 6 or 7 guys that are here and committed, this won’t be a secret, you need to be an all-in Texas Tech guy, not 99%, but 100%, but it is the situation with the portal, but we have a group of guys that are really excited about where we are going.

Part of Coach Adams relationship and I, a lot of our philosophies are different and bounced off of each other, I have been a really face paced offense guy, Coach wants to be one as well, we’re going to be a great job defending people, creating turnovers, and getting stops, and need to do a better job of going down and scoring the basketball when the defense makes mistakes, the pace will go up from what we want to do.

I don’t know if I have the answer on more, you have to look at everything, guys have experience at different levels, we have a lot of experience at that level and the in roads are good at that level, between the portal, high school, and junior college guys, so many of these guys in the portal are one-year guys, we need to have 4-year guys, 3-year guys, there will be one-year guys, I bet you money.

Sean Sutton and I go way back, when he was an assistant coach at Southern Idaho, we had 2 guys play for Coach Sutton, we had a huge banquet for Sutton, our president was an assistant coach for Sutton 40 years ago.

I think my specialty is the Western part of the United States for sure, try to be a balanced staff, obviously the junior college route for me nationwide is a strong one and I’ve used that for sure, I’m a West Coast guy for sure, but I think as Coach builds the staff, I think we’ll be balanced across the country, this is a national brand and we’ll have guys from coast to coast.

The timing was such that we had things going on before coach got the call and I was really hoping Coach would get the call and this was not a tough decision, my wife knew that if I got the call, we weren’t going to discuss any other options. This one is pretty low risk because of my relationship with Coach and I believe in him.

We’re still building that, as we build the staff, I think coach will give out roles and responsibilities for what we should be doing as assistants.

What do we have, until June 1st? We’ve got a while and my fingers are crossed that we can do something, have a normal July and doing things for different events. We’ve become virtual recruiters, but there’s no replacing being in the gym, but how they act and how they talk, so many things. We hope to get back to get back to normal, we really want it back.