Given that coaches generally don’t like to discuss one opponent before playing the teams that come before, it’s been interesting this off-season to hear how much Texas Tech football coach Joey McGuire has talked about the Houston game. I can’t remember him saying hardly anything about — hang on while I double check the schedule — Abilene Christian or Oregon State.
Often in press conferences and seemingly in every public-speaking engagement, McGuire has told the folks the essential nature of packing Jones Stadium for the Big 12 opener. Houston won 10 games last year and beat LSU in the Texas Bowl, a sign that Willie Fritz is up to his old program-building ways again.
Tech announced on Friday, May 8, the kickoff time and television coverage — 7 p.m. on FOX — for the Sept. 18 game. We’ve known since early April that Tech-Houston would be a Friday night game on FOX. Caused a kerfuffle between Texas Tech System Regents chairman Cody Campbell and Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark.
Eight days later, the Big 12 announced nine special-date games for the 2026 season being moved off of Saturdays, part of the conference’s initiative to increase viewership by avoiding some of the Saturday college-football TV traffic. That included the Tech-TCU game being set for Thanksgiving.
How should you sort through all the related hubbub? Glad you asked.
The Red Raiders being dealt a couple of non-Saturday games is perfectly reasonable. For one, it’s a compliment: The Big 12 views Tech, as reigning conference champion and College Football Playoff team, as one that’ll attract viewers. Secondly, it’s the Red Raiders’ turn. As we pointed out a month ago, Tech and Iowa State were the only two Big 12 teams that last year played all their games on Saturdays.
Campbell couched his opposition to Tech-Houston moving to Friday night as a disservice to Texas high-school football. And while it’s true no state puts Friday night football on a taller pedestal than Texas, it’s by a matter of degrees. Teenagers everywhere tee it up on Friday night, and their communities look forward to it all week.
I’ve traveled to cover Tech road games for 40 years. I usually watch the local news the night before, whether holed up in a hotel in Oklahoma or Kansas or West Virginia or wherever. No matter the state, the 10 o’clock sportscast is chock full of Friday night football scores and highlights. So I’m not sympathetic to the thought Texas college programs should be exempt from playing a Friday night game here and there like every other school in the conference.
Tech’s more legitimate beef should be over playing Houston on a short week after a road game in the Pacific Northwest.
The Big 12 has five core (i.e., required) scheduling principles and 10 soft (i.e., preferred but not required) scheduling principles. The closest I can come to ones applying to the Tech at Oregon State/home for Houston six-day turnaround are these:
“Travel considerations will be built into the schedule as much as possible, with an emphasis on players’ health and recovery.” And “Crossing over multiple time zones will be considered in the final sequencing of games.”
And while handling of Thursday games is mentioned in one core principle and four soft principles, treatment of Friday games isn’t mentioned at all.
Perhaps something to bring up at the next Big 12 ADs or coaches meetings.
In regard to the Big 12 and its TV partners moving Tech-TCU to Thanksgiving only a little over a week after the Tech-Houston move to Friday came to light, some Tech fans have suspected the two were related — Tech’s complaining about one non-Saturday game led to the Red Raiders being served another.
That’s not how this stuff works. Tech officials were aware of the TCU game being eyed for Thanksgiving before the rancor over the date switch for the Houston game. They just weren’t bothered by it. And bear in mind, again, that TV partners choose the games they want in the time slots they want.
When it comes to Thanksgiving weekend games at Jones Stadium, Tech athletics has had crowd-size concerns in the past, as many students have left campus for hometowns hundreds of miles away. It’s one reason Tech AD Kirby Hocutt volunteered to play Texas in Austin when the Longhorns wanted to keep playing home games on Thanksgiving. That, and the chance to beat Texas in a standalone game with everyone watching — as happened on a Thursday night in 2015 and a Friday night in 2017.
McGuire didn’t protest playing TCU on Thanksgiving.
Citing all the season-long intel accumulated on the opponent and on his own team, he said, “That game is not as big a deal playing it on a short week.”
Playing UH on a short week? Tougher set of circumstances, which is why McGuire would like to remind everyone to get their tickets now for that one.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: More to know on Texas Tech football beef with Big 12, TV: Williams
Reporting by Don Williams, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal / Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
