Texas Tech Golf

Recap | Barker leads No. 23 #TexasTech over opening day of the Briar’s Creek Invitational.

📰: https://t.co/0kF7Na6oai#WreckEm pic.twitter.com/QMNXfdlc4x

— Texas Tech W Golf (@TexasTechWGolf) March 21, 2017

Texas Tech Track and Field

Texas Tech men come in at No. 12 on the @USTFCCCA preseason ranking #WreckEm https://t.co/f69LSqnP5m pic.twitter.com/aLh8rSBZeh

— TTU Track & Field/XC (@TTU_TF_XC) March 20, 2017

Texas Tech Baseball

Texas Tech is moving on up after a three-game sweep of the Longhorns.

• D1Baseball has Texas Tech #3.
• Baseball America has Texas Tech 8th.

Texas Tech has a two game mid-week series against UNLV. John Henry Gonzalez will get the ball tonight and tomorrow’s starter is TBA. UNLV is about a .500 team right now, 10-11, 5-4, and has a pretty good offense.

Preview | No. 3 #TexasTech Hosts UNLV In Midweek Series – https://t.co/t4hlyANO1W #WreckEm pic.twitter.com/3iszsoFBUH

— Texas Tech Baseball (@TTU_Baseball) March 21, 2017

LAJ’s Carlos Silva, Jr. looks at the series and the Rebels:

In an interesting stat, the Rebels have accumulated a record of 2-9 when it scores five runs or less compared to an 8-2 mark when it pushes across six or more runs.

Bryson Stott, who ended a reached-base streak at 20 over the weekend, is hitting at a .385 clip this season. He’s notched 13 RBIs.

Payton Squier (.318 average, 13 RBIs) and Ernie De La Trinidad (.365, 10 RBIs, two HRs) bring in hitting streaks of 11 and 10 games, respectively.

Nick Ames has provided the power in the lineup, notching five home runs this season.

Red Raider Basketball

Malik Ondigo, a 6’10” center, has five schools that he’s looking at and one of them is Texas Tech, the other four are Purdue, Colorado, Boston College and Nevada. Elevate Hoo’s Julius Kim talked to Ondigo about his five options:

Texas Tech: “They were one of the first schools to offer me back in July and they’ve been strongly interested in me throughout the whole recruiting process. It was (Chris) Beard’s first year coming from a mid-major school and he came in and did pretty well. They beat Baylor, West Virginia, had a one point loss to Kansas and they’re just overall tough. His pitch, to me, has been a lot of early playing time and developing me to get me ready for the highest level. Losing three front court players has a huge part of it too.”

Texas Tech Football

Texas Tech head coach Kliff Kingsbury was on Double-T 104.3 with Chris Level and Aaron Dickens and here are the topics covered:

• Kingsbury did take off for the week of spring break, he was not in Lubbock, but wouldn’t say where he was at.
• Nic Shimonek stayed in Lubbock to work out, the power was shut down in the football building, but Shimonek was still working out. Seeing a different side of Shimonek and can’t let your true leadership qualities come forward not being the starting quarterback.
• Alternating days between offense and defense, staying fresh with signaling with quarterbacks. Sit in on both meetings, learn what’s lacking and what needs to be worked on. Would be watching other offenses in those times that he’s now spending with the defense.
• Discusses the younger defensive linemen: Eli Howard, Houston Miller, Nick McCann, Joe Wallace, Nelson Mbanasor.
• Miller is very enthusiastic about working out, not a lack of emotion with Miller.
• Discusses the junior college guys, Tony Jones, Octavious Morgan, Vaughnte Dorsey and Jaylon Lane. This was an extensive process and Gibbs targeted these guys.
• Locker room renovations, good to have a fresh start, timed up well with the indoor practice facility.
• Really liked Derrick Willies’s attitude, didn’t take much of a Christmas break, gives the team size and toughness.
• Brandon Jones and Jabbar Juluke both being back.

LAJ’s Don Williams continues his Q&A with Rusty Whitt. I linked to the other three parts yesterday, but in today’s edition, you get a very lengthy answer from Whitt about some of these guys, particuarly some of the young defensive linemen. The other thing to note is when these guys are down, Whitt tries to tell a story about how they push players and how to make decisions to push through things that are uncomfortable:

“Here’s an example: Like Miller. I was telling you about Miller, a friend of mine. (U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robbie Miller, who died at age 24 in Afghanistan, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in 2010.) He walked into a near ambush and decided to run into it and get into a gunfight with these bad guys. And he went into it and Afghani forces turned and ran away from him. But he chose the hard way. He chose the bravest path. And he charged into it with hellfire and fought into it. He chose the bravest path.

“I tell these kids to wake up and make the bravest decision. What’s the bravest thing you can do today? And then when they gain confidence – that’s the huge thing for me is for a team to get confident. When they get confidence, it’s going to spread. Against Baylor, we had some early settings of confidence. What happens, it spreads like a wildfire. I try to get our guys to understand the importance of that.”

RRS’s Drew Kohnle talked to preferred walk-on running back Jake LeVrier, who played for Bellaire Episcopal, which is the same high school as Gio Pancotti. LeVrier was injured quite a bit as a senior, but hopes to get back on track as a preferred walk-on.

Yahoo! Sports Shutdown Corner is taking a look the top 50 players eligible for the NFL draft and Patrick Mahomes is at #39. It’s lengthy, but here’s a bit:

Upside: Rare arm with the ability to sling the ball all over the field from different arm angles. Registered highest mph of any quarterback at the NFL scouting combine. The entire field is in play when he has the ball. Can throw the deep out from the far hashmark and arc the ball over DBs’ heads (see Oklahoma game). Drills the quick slant with confidence. Mahomes carries himself like a leader and wants the ball in his hands with the game on the line. Has a real swagger and confidence that he can make any play.

This is a bit interesting, Philly Sports Network has a profile on Tyler Scalzi as a possible guy that can help the Philadelphia Eagles and looking to gain an NFL roster spot:

When you watch the game tape, you can see how he fits, in the NFL, and with the Eagle love for special teams and versatility, his fit in philly’ is an obvious one as well. When you talk to him, it is easy to see why he is such a well liked player amongst his team. With his capability to play everything from Linebacker, to long snapper, and all the way back to Tight-End, Scalzi could be a steal for the Birds’. A steal, that could one day, pay dividends in more than one way.