Basketball

De’Vion Harmon gets to know Pop Isaacs, Elijah Fisher, and Robert Jennings.

The Maui Jim Maui Invitational announced their bracket and Texas Tech will play Creighton on November 21st.

Football

Tyree Wilson has been named to the Chuck Bednarik Award watch list, which goes to the nation’s best defensive player.

FootballScoop’s Zach Barnett writes about the 15 most important assistant coach hires and checking in at No. 15 is Texas Tech defensive coordinator Tim DeRuyter:

At Texas Tech, DeRuyter plans to run multiple fronts and coverages while disguising his looks from snap to snap.

“I know it’s coach-speak to say multiple but that’s truly what we are. We’re going to bounce between 3 and 4 man fronts, play zone and man, and show sim pressure and hopefully create some angst on the opposing side,” DeRuyter told FootballScoop.

“One of the biggest things that I was so attracted to in getting Tim here is that he is very similar to Ron Roberts and Coach Aranda in what they do on defense schematically,” McGuire told The Athletic.

Both defenses utilize a Star, basically the do-it-all fifth defensive back tasked with playing behind the line of scrimmage or deep in coverage from down to down. “You’ve got to go have a guy that can play some man coverage, pressure off the edge, a great feel for the game so he can disguise when he’s coming and get out when he’s not,” DeRuyter’s said. Texas Tech’s success defensively likely hinges on finding a Jalen Pitre, a safety who led Baylor’s Big 12 champion defense with 18.5 tackles for loss and also swiped two interceptions. (Pitre was the Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year in 2021, so finding a replica of Pitre may be more realistic than an exact duplicate.)

24/7 Sports’ Chris Hummer writes about tight end coach Josh Cochran as a top 30 coach under 30:

Cochran, who dropped from 310 pounds to 230 in just over six months, served as a student assistant for Texas in 2014. From there, he coached high school football (Lindale, Texas) and worked as run-game coordinator at Division-III East Texas Baptist. Those jobs gave him a crash course in just what it meant to teach.

“Working at the high school and D-III level is the best thing that could’ve happened to me,” Cochran said. “You have to be a great teacher. I think breaking it down to a seventh-, eighth- or ninth-grader how to play offensive line is as hard as anything you can do.”

The next season, starting in 2017, Cochran joined Baylor’s staff as a graduate assistant. It’s there that he first spent any significant time around now Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire. Cochran worked with the Bears for three years during Matt Rhule’s tenure before reuniting with his Texas head coach, Mack Brown, at North Carolina as a quality control coach in 2020.