10 Things: Texas Tech 52, West Virginia 15

1. Game Links:

2. That Was Fun. Real fun. Getting 8 wins, something that hasn’t happened since 2009. A 6-3 conference record where I think that there were wins that were available, so this could have been an even more successful season. And I’m not asking for more, I’m quite happy with how the season turned out, despite everything, and I’m proud. That’s 8 wins to celebrate and that’s something that hasn’t happened for a really long time. Take a sip of champagne and celebrate for the day. I know there’s a lot of work to do and I think they have identified what needs help, but that’s for Monday.

3. Take a Bow Tahj. Tahj Brooks was so good, 233 all-purpose yards, 188 rushing, 35 receiving, 3 touchdowns and just churned out yards on the ground. West Virginia never had an answer and that’s evident by Brooks’ 8.2 yards a carry. And it was only fitting that Brooks ended his career at Texas Tech with his career high of 188 rushing yards and finished the year with 1,505 rushing yards, which is the second year for Brooks to run for 1,500+ yards in a season.

4. Defense Showed Up. I had my doubts that the defense was going to be able to do much of anything in this game because West Virginia was so good at running the ball. Down two starting defensive tackles and a secondary that gave up passing yards to everyone. That’s not what happened. The Texas Tech defense only allowed West Virginia in the red zone 2 times all game long. Only allowed 4 yards a rush (only 2.2 through the 3rd quarter). Texas Tech hassled Garret Greene, 4 sacks and 3 tackles for a loss as the Mountaineers could not protect Green. A fumble recover, 2 interceptions, and 2 stopped 4th downs, turning the ball over 5 times is sort of a problem for the Mountaineers. The defense turned in a memorable performance when the cards were certainly stacked against them. Kudos.

5. 50-Burger. After the first two drives, I thought we were in for a long day, settling for two field goals. And then in the second quarter, Texas Tech turned it on. Texas Tech had 232 yards of offense, scored 29 points, had 138 passing and 94 rushing yards, including 12 first downs, 8.9 yards a play and held onto the ball just 8 seconds more than West Virginia.

For the day, Behren Morton was 28 of 41 for 359 yards, that’s a 68% completion percentage, 2 touchdowns and 1 interception that was thrown into triple coverage. Josh Kelly finished the year with 1,000 yards receiving, 9 receptions for 150 yards and should have had a touchdown but just couldn’t hang onto a shoe-string pass from Morton. The offensive line didn’t give up a sack and paved the way for 210 rushing yards for the day on 33 attempts. This was a dominant effort from the offense and this West Virginia defense wasn’t as bad as giving up 52 points.

6. Stats & Stuff.

If you would have asked me, I never would have thought that West Virginia completed 60% of their 3rd downs, but they did, but had to average 7.7 yards to go.
Texas Tech converted 9 of 12 for 75%, and had an averaged distance of 4.2 yards to go.
Only 19% of their downs were passing downs, which means that on 2nd down with 8+ yards to go and 3rd & 4th down with 5+ yards to go. That means they were ahead of the sticks by a lot.
On 1st downs alone, Texas Tech averaged 7.7 yards a play and had 4 touchdowns coming off of 1st downs.
69% of Texas Tech’s plays were run on West Virginia’s side of the field.
Texas Tech had 14 big plays, which is rushes of 10% yards and completions of 15+ yards.
Texas Tech was 7 of 7 in the red zone, while West Virginia was just 1 of 2, meaning they simply could not drive down the field into Texas Tech’s end of the field.

7. Coordinator Questions. I don’t know what’s going to happen with the coordinators. Of all days, yesterday, they both displayed why they are so good. Both sides of the ball have had issues with injuries and both had games that were stellar. The defense absolutely showed up and it’s as if they knew the plays before they happened so many times. The potential is there and I don’t think that West Virginia is as bad as the score indicates.

My gut tells me that some sort of change will happen, but I don’t know that I would pull the trigger if I were the head coach.

8. Idle Thoughts.

Caleb Douglas is a really good receiver and his 31-yard touchdown catch was ridiculously good.
It was good to see both Mason Tharp and Jalin Conyers be involved, a total of 6 catches for 46 yards and Tharp should have had 2 touchdowns. I don’t know what their pro prospects are like, but they’ll at the very least get free agent looks.
Terrell Tilmon was great in that 2nd quarter, 2 sacks, 4 tackles overall and a forced fumble.
For once, Jacob Rodriguez didn’t lead the team in tackles. Marquel Dingle was all over the field, had 9 tackles on the day.
As a defense, the group had 7 tackles for a loss, Curry and Lewis shared one, while Horn, Rodriguez, McCarty, and Cofield each had 1, while Tilmon had 2.
Speaking of Jayden Cofield, not a super dominant day, but he had 2 tackles, and Amier Washington showed up as well. So many of these young guys will play significantly bigger roles next year, plus all of the guys who are out with injury.

9. Coach Comments.

Opening statement…

“Well, I want to start off by thanking our crowd and fans. Our last two home games have been embarrassing. We know that. We’ve talked about that, and we wanted to play better at home for our fans and I’m really proud of the way they did it. I can’t thank them enough for showing up today. I thought it was a great atmosphere, especially with a lot of our students at home for Thanksgiving and I can’t thank our seniors enough. We have such great leadership on this team. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I don’t know if I’ve ridden more highs and lows of a season than this season and for them to be able to do what they did. This is a lot of credit to the coaches, staff and the quarterback and the offensive line, but it’s the first time in the history of Texas Tech that you’ve had a 1,000-yard receiver and a 1,500-yard rusher. Josh Kelly went over 1,000 yards today and then Tahj Brooks, that’s why we wanted to make sure that last part, I asked him if he wanted to try to get over 1,500 [yards] and he did. I can’t thank those guys enough. The eight wins are really big for us. The one thing we didn’t reach, was our goal, where we want to be – we want to be playing in Dallas next week. That didn’t happen, but to be able to do something like this, where you get to eight regular season wins that hadn’t been done since the late, great Mike Leach, so we take a lot of pride in that. We talked about that a lot this week. Whenever you start talking about leaving your legacy as a senior, the things that you’ve done, that was
important to them.”

On if he thought this was the most complete second quarter they’ve played…

“Yeah, without a doubt. You know, the low kind of came in the first quarter because we couldn’t get in the endzone, even though I was little surprised that ball didn’t get overturned. I thought Mason [Tharp] got a foot in for a touchdown, and we had to kick a couple of field goals. I thought that the tempo that we played with today, really that we played with the last two weeks was good. It’s the second week in a row, we scored over 50 points. I thought Behren [Morton] was really locked in. We didn’t give up a sack. He got hit a couple times today, but we didn’t give up a sack today, and we played really well in that second quarter.”

On how the defense played today…

“I was really proud of the defense and the players, because, man, we’re banged up. You know, we lost [E’Maurion Banks] in the Baylor game, and then we lost Quincy Ledet Jr. last week. We lost De’Braylon Carroll last week. So now you’re going to some young deep tackles. I thought James Hansen, the senior played really well. I thought Jayden Cofield showed up and was running the football. He had a couple of big plays, one on a screen, and one, he was able to not give up the two-point conversion when they threw it to number 74. And then we got pressure on the quarterback. When you get pressure on the quarterback, you cause turnovers. That leads to second quarters and games like this. So, I was excited
for that.”

On how Behren Morton played today…

“He’s one of the toughest players I have ever been around in my life. If y’all could see, and he would wear it every week, what he had to go through last year to get ready to play every week and give us an opportunity to win and get us into a bowl game and play great that bowl game. Then this year, I think Tahj [Brooks] probably knows better, because he’s been around him longer and knows, but I don’t know if I’ve seen more of a growth in a player from the standpoint of leadership, changing his body. He’s in here so I can make fun of him, but he had a dad bod last year. I was surprised he ever took his shirt and if he did take it off any girls would date him. I’m telling y’all, he changed his body. It has a lot to do with our medical staff and our strength staff. Our medical staff, Mike Ramirez, went out of his way to find the experts to go through the things that he needed to do. We went to Jacksonville [Florida] last year with all of the [physical therapy] stuff, and then our strength staff, especially Lance Barilow, our head strength coach. He and Behren spent a lot of time together, building his upper body strength and putting him in a good position to be able to go out every week. I’m proud of him. He did some great things. I know what he did today, but I don’t have the numbers on what he did on the year, but the other thing that I thought that he really did and what we asked was you look at us the first two years, it is a bad stat of us being in the negative whenever it comes to turnovers. And one of the things that we really focused on in the spring and in camp was taking care of the football and as many times as we throw the football on this offense, I thought that he did an absolutely incredible job. We’ll end up on the plus side. It might only be like one or two, but we’re going to end up on the plus side and if you can end up on the plus side of turnovers throughout the year, then that’s a big gauge of you winning games.”

10. Tortilla Tossin’ Players of the Game.

Tahj Brooks and his 188 yards rushing with an additional 35 yards receiving. He’s the whole package. So durable and strong.

I don’t know that Behren Morton gets enough credit, but he was really good, we don’t think twice about 359 yards passing, but that’s a big number and think that he and Josh Kelly should share these two tortillas with Kelly’s 150 yards receiving.

I’m giving all 3 tortillas to the Texas Tech defense. An absolutely beat up unit held West Virginia to 248 yards through 3 quarters, 62 rushing yards, which was just 2.2 yards a rush and West Virginia had no answer. The reason why I go through the 3rd quarter is because the defense did give up some yards in the 4th quarter that were meaningless and sullied the dominance of the defense.