Good morning! I hope you all had a great weekend. I was busy all weekend long, form mowing on Saturday and working outside most of the day to fertilizing before showers started yesterday and then spent the day freezing peaches and blackberries (there were a lot of both of those).

Athlon Sports has their preview of Texas Tech, which isn’t really all that great. They have Texas Tech pegged as the 71st best team in the nation, which is probably more about what the team has been versus what the team projects to be. I’d say that projecting teams is more difficult, especially with transfers entering into the program. Here’s a bit, feel free to click on through:

The new Red Raider offense under Cumbie will be the main attraction for Tech this year. Will the offense further help a defense that managed to keep Tech in games in 2020? In order for Tech to make it to its first bowl game since 2017, the offense needs to produce like the explosive Red Raider offenses of past regimes, while the defense must continue to show steady improvement.

Athlon also ranked all 130 teams so you can go through that (much of the write-up is the same for each team), but here’s the write-up for some of the defense.

Defensive Strength: The Red Raiders showed some slight improvement on this side of the ball last year by lowering their per-play average from 6.6 (2019) to 5.7. Coordinator Keith Patterson has extra help on the way from the transfer portal, which adds to a defense that already returned eight starters. This is a veteran group that would appear to have the pieces in place to improve.

Defensive Concern: The per-play number was a little better last year, but that was the extent of the good news. Texas Tech generated only 17 sacks, ranked ninth in the Big 12 in rush defense, eighth in pass efficiency defense and surrendered 36.7 points a contest.

USA Today’s Berry Tramel ranks every Power 5 non-conference schedule and has Texas Tech ranked 52nd overall. This is actually higher than I thought because FIU is terrible and SFA is Division II, so yeah, this is fine.

There were no commits this weekend, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be any commits as a result of the weekend. Regardless, summer workouts continue.

Putting in the work 😤 pic.twitter.com/vzEPHdh2Hf

— Texas Tech Football (@TexasTechFB) June 25, 2021