Texas Tech’s football success is attributed to head coach Joey McGuire, who brings a high school coaching mentality to the program.
The team, built with significant financial backing from boosters, has become a national contender by acquiring key players through the transfer portal.
McGuire has successfully managed a roster of high-profile transfers, creating a unified and disciplined team.
LUBBOCK, TX – Lost here in the wild well blowout of cash, ground zero for the excess of big money college football, is a high school football coach.
You’re damn right Joey McGuire is, unapologetically.
Week after week, rout after rout, with every win that brings No. 9 Texas Tech closer to blue-blood programs and conferences that run college football, the dichotomy of it all quietly overflows like the black gold that built this moment.
“I’m a high school coach who coaches college football, not the other way around,” McGuire told me in the spring, when this dangerous $25 million Frankenstein roster was being built. “And it has prepared me for anything.”
The best team money can buy won again Saturday, this time a 29-7 emasculation of previously unbeaten No. 8 Brigham Young. But don’t get lost in the narrative.
While cold, hard cash brought elite players to this prairie town in the middle of nowhere, a tough Texan who built his coaching chops at a left-for-dead high school job and has never forgotten it, who still drives that same white pickup truck from all those years ago, is the guy who makes it all work.
All of those personalities. All of those mercenaries on one-year, prove-it deals. All of that locker room uncertainty, where the green and greed of the game wrestles daily with straight jealousy.
While so many are still figuring out this thing, still complaining about “sustainability” and the end of the game as we know it, McGuire has a 600-pound gorilla growing with each week, looking more like an elite SEC or Big Ten team with every rout, every statement.
‘We have another gear,’ McGuire said after the Red Raiders polished off another how you like me now victory. ‘We can play even better.’
Students started camping out for this game a week ago, while ESPN rolled its ‘College GameDay’ production trucks all the way to West Texas for the first time in years. The place was electric, the moment wasn’t too big, and this too big to fail team kept steamrolling everything in its path like one of those haboob dust storms that suffocate the plains.
Texas Tech has won nine games this season, all nine by at least 22 points. The Red Raiders have a defense that rivals any in the nation, including those at Ohio State and Indiana and any SEC team you want to bring to the argument.
Texas Tech ran for almost 200 non-sack yards, and held BYU — which was averaging 216 rushing yards a game — to just 67 yards on 27 carries. The Red Raiders did what McGuire’s state title teams at Cedar Hill High School in suburban Dallas did, where it’s toughest team wins.
They ran the ball, they stopped the run. Then meticulously eliminated any doubt.
They did what he promised when he was introduced as coach in 2021, when nothing seemed to be working for more than a decade ― since Mike Leach was run off because a player went public with allegations of mistreatment (which were never proven). There may as well have been a curse on the program.
Tommy Tuberville, Kliff Kingsbury, Matt Wells. All tried to recreate the magic of Leach, none succeeded.
Until the high school coach stepped in, and instead of declaring love for the past, made a declarative, defining statement.
“I can tell you this,” McGuire said that day, “We are going to play defense.”
Because when all else fails in high school football, when nothing seems to be working, you play defense. Toughest guy wins.
By the time it was long over, as Texas Tech was playing coverage and protecting 26-0 lead, BYU finally reached its fifth play — fifth play! — in Texas Tech territory with nine minutes to play. The rest of what played out was inconsequential.
BYU ran 65 plays, 11 of which were in Texas Tech territory.
‘One thing that makes this team different is we can rely on defense,’ McGuire said. ‘To win at a high level anywhere, you have to play defense.’
That’s why McGuire, with the help of billionaire booster (and former Texas Tech offensive lineman) Cody Campbell, zeroed in on defense this offseason. The roster needed impact players, and the staff identified who fit from the transfer portal — and Campbell made it happen.
The best team money can buy continues to be a bear investment.
There’s no better defensive line in the nation, the group that has defined this pay for play season of championship or bust. They’re all transfers, including star edge rushers David Bailey and Romello Height, and interior tackles Lee Hunter and A.J. Holmes.
Three of the four starters in the secondary are transfers, including sticky corners Dontae Balfour and Brice Pollack. Then there’s linebacker Jacob Rodriguez, who transferred from Virginia and arrived in Lubbock in 2021 as an H-Back — before McGuire saw a linebacker.
Now he’s arguably the best defensive player in the game. Or, what the heck, a legit Heisman Trophy candidate.
‘I’ve never had more fun playing football,’ Rodriguez said. ‘We are so close, this team. We love each other. Each and every one of us.’
The development of Rodriguez, the perfect example of what can be, is the backbone of what McGuire has accomplished in four seasons. The undeniable example of what happens when everyone is pulling the same way, when the process isn’t superseded by egos.
When harmony in the locker room translates to a well-orchestrated symphony on the field. When it’s not throwing money at a problem, it’s fixing what’s broken with smart investments.
Texas Tech is one of the least penalized teams in the Big 12, and is plus-10 in turnover ratio. The Red Raiders don’t make mind-numbing mistakes, don’t put themselves in precarious spots with poor decisions.
They’re a well-oiled machine that continues to get better, and more dangerous, in the shadow of blue blood programs that continue to ignore them. Or complain about them.
Texas Tech is where Indiana was last season, the outlier that made those in the exclusive club anxious from the unknown. Except this time, it’s one step further.
Indiana is a flagship member of the Big Ten. Texas Tech may as well be a college football vagabond, a bit player in an afterthought ‘Power’ conference trying to get its nose under the big top tent.
Don’t get mad at them for finding a way. Don’t ignore their breakout season because it doesn’t look like it should.
The SEC and Big Ten made these rules. See how they like it when Campbell and his partners at Double Eagle start shoveling oil money at the problem.
‘A lot of it is making sure you’re doing business with the right kind of people,’ Campbell said. ‘Joey has done a really good job, and has everyone believing in what we’re doing. That’s why it has worked ― because of how he runs the program.’
Ask anyone involved in this unusual and wildly unsettling process of private NIL deals. It’s an absolute crapshoot.
Texas Tech is everything it shouldn’t be with a team full of big-money transfers in the player empowerment era of the game. Marrying all of those personalties, all that need for playing time, with an existing roster, is next to impossible.
Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe at some point it becomes as much about the coach as the $25 million spent to win a championship.
‘From the first day we met (McGuire), he told us to trust him, we would get here,’ said Texas Tech quarterback Behren Morton, who has played the last month of the season with a hairline fracture in his lower leg.
A Lubbock native, Morton wakes every Sunday and it’s difficult to walk. He’s hurting, and says he practically lives in the training room. He’s trying every medical option and rehab available.
He’s not missing this ride. Not after he grew up here, not after everything McGuire promised is right in front of them.
‘The whole city deserved this,’ Morton says.
Late in another impressive win, after Texas Tech further distanced itself from the Big 12 and moved closer to the heavyweights in the Big Ten and SEC, former Tech star Patrick Mahomes was shown on the big screen at the stadium.
He waved his arms, and the sellout crowd of 60,000 went wild.
This isn’t the old days at Texas Tech. It’s the new world of college football, where money means everything.
With the right coach.
Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow m on X at @MattHayesCFB.