That’s all Kirby Hocutt needs to do: find a football coach for Texas Tech who will please the fans who are still angry at Mike Leach’s dismissal and who will win like the pirate but isn’t exactly Art Briles. Think about it, while he’s at it, get the Red Raiders in a position to dominate Big 12 football once Texas and Oklahoma are paroled.
If you do all of that, Kirby, you could even hire another soccer coach one day.
Over a decade in Lubbock, Hocutt raised the profile of tech by hiring a coach to lead the men’s basketball team to a Final Four and another to go to the College World Series. But he’s 0 for 2 in soccer coaches, the only category that fans score in.
Hocutt, a former Kansas State linebacker, hired Matt Wells to bring some strength to a football program that had gotten a little sloppy under Kliff Kingsbury. He made the move by himself. The board was said to have been split over Briles or Dana Holgorsen, a former Leach assistant who was West Virginia head coach at the time. Hocutt was in the minority on Wells, to say the least.
Standing by your principles is admirable, but it does badly if you don’t win.
The obvious choices this time around are Sonny Dykes of SMU, son of Spike, one of the most popular coaches in tech history and a Leach protégé, and Jeff Traylor, who is currently doing wonders at UTSA.
Honestly, both would be a hit, and neither would cause the setback caused by hiring Briles.
But whatever you think of his guilt in the Baylor scandal, and I am on record, he wins wherever he goes.
Cody Campbell, a lineman on Leach’s team and a member of his alma mater’s Board of Regents, seemed to be saying the same thing when he liked this tweet the other day:
Why are Art Briles audiences wrong? He’s a proven winner who knows how to reverse a bad program. We are a bad program and we need a winner.
By the way, did I mention that Cody Campbell is on the Hocutt Search Committee?
Perhaps Campbell, who made a fortune selling the oil business he co-founded, just floated a test balloon. Like a tweet and see if others do the same. Or maybe he’s all in on Briles. I find it hard to believe he would be on committee if the latter were true. Hocutt needs openness if he’s going to fix all those fences in West Texas.
But it’s easy to see why so many Red Raiders fans are still bitter that the pirate was forced to go over the plank. For the same reason, many Baylor people are angry that Briles got the goal. None of the fan bases had enjoyed a winning program for years before their heroes took power, and they haven’t held many parades since then.
Consider a little story: between Pete Cawthon’s exploits in the Depression era and 1950, it was quite common to win in Lubbock. But when Tech joined the Southwest Conference in 1960, things got a lot tougher. No coach had more than three successful seasons in a row from 1995 to 1999, until Spike had five in a row. Even so, Spike only won more than seven games, or even nine, twice.
Leach, on the other hand, had 10 consecutive winning seasons with a career high of 11-2 in 2008.
Since the pirate’s noisy departure, the Red Raiders have recorded an average of 5.7 victories. Given the rest of Tech’s schedule, that number shouldn’t change much.
Winning shouldn’t be that difficult in Lubbock. No, it’s not exactly a garden place. Ames, Iowa, neither. Or Waco for that matter. Even so, Matt Campbell and Dave Aranda don’t seem to have much of a problem.
Is it enough to find a good coach? Tommy Tuberville was a good coach, and he might have been the long-term answer if he hadn’t necessarily gotten out. I practically said that when I spoke to him for the first time in Lubbock. Before comparing it to Beirut.
Sonny Dykes is getting West Texas, and as I mentioned earlier, he would be a great employee. He might be interested for several reasons. He would work at a power five conference which makes recruiting easier and he would likely make a lot more money.
On the other hand, Dykes likes SMU and doesn’t have a lot of ego. He could also have an easier path to the expanded college football playoffs if the Mustangs can dominate the watered-down American Athletic Conference. He could of course think the same about the Big 12 after Texas and OU.
Tech officials want to fill the power vacuum left by the Longhorns and Sooners, and it won’t be easy. Oklahoma State has just hung up again with Mike Gundy, who has won his 16th straight season what has taken the previous five coaches 32 years to do. The Cowboys, Baylor, and Iowa State have a head start when it comes to technology. Maybe Kansas State too. Not to mention the newcomers Cincinnati, UCF and Houston.
In order for tech to defy all of these competitors and its history, it needs to get the right man now. No more wrongdoing. Or the next soccer coach Kirby hires will be his last.
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