Congrats to Sonny Cumbie who was named as the new head coach at Louisiana Tech. Cumbie will start work at Louisiana Tech and then return on December 13th where he’ll coach the bowl game. Running backs coach DeAndre Smith will handle the day-to-day operations for the program before December 13th.

This is highly strange, but I am incredibly thankful that Cumbie is doing this. The entire thing is awkward and for Cumbie to take time from being a head coach of his own program to coach a bowl game speaks to the quality of person that he is.

“I’d like to personally congratulate Sonny Cumbie on being named the next head coach at Louisiana Tech,” Hocutt said. “I think anyone that knows Sonny can feel the passion and love he has for Texas Tech University and West Texas, and he brought that every day this past year as our offensive coordinator and most recently as our interim head coach.

I think there’s two schools of thought regarding who head coach Joey McGuire hires as the new Texas Tech coordinator and I sort of have a third.

• The first is to hire someone like Western Kentucky offensive coordinator Zach Kittley, a disciple of Kliff Kingsbury and someone that likes to throw the damn ball. We remember Kittley when Houston Baptist almost beat Texas Tech as he was at the helm calling plays. Kittley is pass-heavy in nature and as we’ve sort of discovered, that is not always conducive to winning football. A pass-heavy offense can lead to some short drives and leave the defense on the field more than they should be. Western Kentucky was 21st in FEI offense.
• USC offensive coordinator Graham Harrell is the other option that seems to come up quite a bit. Harrell is not as pass-heavy as Kittley and that makes sense given the type of personnel and history at USC, they almost always have running backs and offensive linemen that can run the danged ball for days. Despite the 4-7 record, USC was 39th in offense, which isn’t great, but if you’re looking at things, a team like Oklahoma State was 41st and Pittsburgh was 9-2 and 40th, so good teams can have top 40 offenses and be fine.
• The third option would be to figure out what you want to be as you have an absolute clean slate. Dave Aranda’s offense in his first year was spread in nature with Larry Fedora as the OC, Joe Wickline as the offensive line coach, and fired them both quickly. Aranda scoured the various offenses that he liked and went out and hired BYU’s offensive coordinator Jeff Grimes and be a run oriented team. I think that you might see something like that from McGuire and I think that you might be surprised who he picks. Of course, it’s also important as to how much money he has to spend and my guess is that he’s going to have a decent amount.