Texas Tech Fires Up the "Fun and Get Your Guns Up" Offense

Like many obsessed college football fans around the country, the summer tends to be the most anti-climactic season of the year for me.

Sure, I enjoy spending some nice evenings sailing on Lake Pontchartrain and taking the annual vacation, but once the College World Series is over, I end up sailing right into the Bermuda Triangle of the sports calendar. 

So when mid-June rolls around, the most exciting thing I do is roll down to the local Borders Book Store and look for the new college football preview magazines.

After thumbing through a lot of the predictable blather, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Texas Tech Red Raiders were in almost everybody's Top 20 poll.  Many even have the boys from Lubbock competing for the Big 12 Championship, and possibly a BCS Bowl.

As the summer drew on, and I started to pour over the many articles and blogs that were developing about the 2008 season, and I noticed a pattern forming among many of the so called Big 12 experts.  They all seemed to be indignant about the love that Texas Tech was getting this preseason, and downright scoffed at the idea of them winning the Big 12. 

So the first thing I wanted to look for among these negative nannies was a common denominator of reasons to downplay the Red Raiders' expectations this year. 

Most seemed to point to the fact that Texas Tech hasn't won an outright conference championship since 1955, and others put the spotlight on Tech's reputation for fielding weak defensive units that never match up to the high-powered offensive system that Mike Leach brought to the program.

Others used what they described as a "lack of tradition" at Texas Tech.

Well, I wasn't buying any of that garbage.  Maybe they had a point about the last several years of Texas Tech defense, but let's give credit where it is due.

First, these guys don't play in a lay down conference nor do they have a cake schedule like some of our friends a little further to the west.  The Big 12 is tough and packed with talent year in and year out.

Second, Texas Tech has to compete for recruits with the two intraconference big boys in their home state.  And let's face it, when it comes to recruiting, Oklahoma might as well be located in the state of Texas as well. 

Finally, let's look at the "sentiment" that Texas Tech somehow has a lack of tradition.  This is where I really had to take issue with these "experts" since they strike me as Big 12 homers who didn't want to let the new kid sit at the lunch table.  Besides, nobody can accuse me of being of being a Texas Tech hack (everyone knows I'm an LSU hack).

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