So much football news over the last few days that I’m not sure where to start. Let’s hit the highlights.
There’s a report that Texas Tech will hire Texas State offensive coordinator Mack Leftwich on a 3-year deal. Leftwich had a very solid offense at Texas State that I don’t know much about specifics. Leftwich was a former UTEP quarterback that was injured and never really was able to play. So he started coaching and has risen up the ranks largely with Eric Morris at Incarnate Word, who then followed went to GJ Kinne to Texas State when Morris went to be the OC at Washington State (before he became the head coach at North Texas).
Advanced stats say that the Texas State offense was really well-rounded, which I definitely think fits McGuire’s style. Texas State ran for 2,506 yards and threw for 3,186 this past year. For comparison purposes, Texas Tech ran for 1,941 and passed for 3,577. You can see that the Texas State offense pretty well was in the top 3rd of offenses of just about every metric without deficiencies in any one spot.
Jacob Rodriguez announced that he would return for his redshirt senior season. That’s great news for the Texas Tech defense.
National Signing Day was Wednesday and I sort of forgot about it. There were some surprises in a positive way. It was said that Texas Tech was able to flip a 4-star away from Texas A&M, Connor Carty (6-5/300), an offensive lineman from Prosper, but I think some spots weren’t available for TAMU so he didn’t have a spot with them and he was still very much wanted by numerous high-end programs, but he chose Texas Tech. That’s great. Texas Tech also signed tight end Sean Robinson (6-4/200), originally committed to Arizona I think, and switched late in the game.
Micah Hudson is probably still going to enter the transfer portal and go play somewhere else. McGuire addressed Hudson’s situation in the presser embedded above. McGuire said that he wished that Hudson had not been injured when he arrived at Texas Tech, he apparently played injured in high school, so he had to get caught up in the summer workouts and that’s just not enough these days. I’m at peace with this situation and although I felt that he should have played more early (especially in blowout situations), I think it turned out that the best players did play, Caleb Douglas and Coy Eakin along with Josh Kelly who was consistently great. Make the coaches play you.
Texas Tech is possibly going to hire Garrett McGuire in some capacity from Nebraska. The Cornhuskers signed Dana Holgorsen as the offensive coordinator and he brought someone along with him that will likely push out McGuire at Nebraska. I think the offensive coaching staff will be the same and don’t see Joey pushing out an assistant for Garrett, but we’ll see.
This is a basketball item, but my suspicions regarding Devan Cambridge came to pass yesterday as it was announced that Cambridge was going to seek another medical redshirt year and was no longer with the team. My guess is that Cambridge thought he was going to start and he was playing in a reserve role with the team. There was really not a place for him to play significant minutes because he’s not really a guard and can’t shoot the ball, he plays more like Toppin than anything else. I wish him luck, but wish that he would have announced he was leaving before the season started so that his spot could go to someone that wanted to be here. These things happen so I’m not upset about it and had somewhat prepared myself for this.