The Morning Stake: February 21st

Track and Field

Golf

Lady Raider Basketball

Baseball

I’m not going to have time this year to do all of the mid-week games. We’ll obviously cover them, post the previews and whatnot here in The Morning Stake as well as the results, but I won’t have an open thread.

Texas Tech moved up to #11 in D1Baseball’s weekly top 25.

Football

Not sure this was just released yesterday, but here you go.

Buy your very own Staking The Plains t-shirt. Click on that danged shirt.

Gridiron Now’s David Ubben ranks the Big 12’s running back and has Texas Tech’s backs at 9th in the conference:

The skinny: As great as Pat Mahomes was last season, the Red Raiders’ running game devolved into production even below what we became accustomed to seeing under Mike Leach. Justin Stockton had a nightmare year. Freshman Da’Leon Ward emerged as the bell-cow back in the final month of the season and was serviceable, but unremarkable. Demarcus Felton fell out of favor late, but might re-emerge. The Red Raiders are starved for more balance, and they’ll look anywhere to find it.

Ian Boyd, who writes for Inside Texas (a Longhorn focused site) as well as Football Study Hall, has his own site where he annually breaks down the Big 12 recruiting classes and goes position-by-position on Texas Tech’s class.

Job no. 1 for Kingsbury with this class was adding the pieces he needs to finally produce a winning season and save his job. A decent, 6-8 win season would probably buy him another year while anything better would put him back in good standing and anything worse could sink him.

Kingsbury added a bunch of JUCOs that could bring immediate upgrades to his defense, particularly riskies Jaylon Lane and Dakota Allen, and found an overlooked QB in McLane Carter that’s a nice insurance policy at worst and a possible upgrade over Shimonek at best.

They didn’t stock their freshman class with too many long-term assets but they didn’t sign a bunch of JAGs either. Many of the players in this freshman class could potentially grow into really good players down the line. It’s all going to come down to Lane and Allen. If the risk pays off then the Raiders will probably be good enough on defense to win more games and buy Kingsbury more time to bring in more talented freshman in 2018. If it doesn’t, then the whole program could come crashing down with a thud.

Make sure and check the whole thing out.

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