The Morning Stake | 2018.11.20

Texas Tech Volleyball

Lady Raider Basketball

Texas Tech Basketball

Wanted to post a couple of recaps from last night with quotes from Head coach Chris Beard as they are highly entertaining to me.

A-J Media:

“We were just sluggish in the first half and that’s just not us. That’s not me. … We just can’t let that happen,” Mooney said. “So second half, I just wanted to bring the energy, got a couple of steals and got them in transition a little bit. Once we got some shots, it got contagious.”

With the victory, Texas Tech (4-0) advance to the championship game to play former Big 12 member Nebraska (4-0) at 8:30 p.m. Tuesday in the same venue.

“I’ve only seen Nebraska play one time. I watched their game just on television,” Texas Tech coach Chris Beard said of Nebraska. “So now we’ll dig in (Monday night). But I know this: they’re really good. They look to me like an obvious Sweet 16 type team on paper.”

Wichita Falls Times Record News’ Andy Newberry:

“I can’t really talk about halftime,” Beard said. “I got three daughters and I like my paycheck.

“We have some guys who want to be coached. We had two things going on. First, it was effort, toughness, who were are, our DNA, I wasn’t pleased with that. And basketball, we weren’t playing well.”

Beard knows coaching at basically every level. Respect goes both ways. The want to be better than before has to as well. So I asked him know many times he can expect to do what he did Monday night? How many times can they be challenged like that?

“I was actually thinking about that when I walked back to the floor for the second half,” Beard admitted. “Truth telling, it sounds like a given. We don’t waste a lot of time; we don’t have time to play mind games. We go to work every day to get better, we understand what the competition is in a tournament like this and in our league. We start that in recruiting. We recruit guys who want to be coached hard and be told the truth.”

Texas Tech Football

USAToday reporter Dan Wolken tweeted out the following yesterday (I posted this in the comments, but not everyone reads the comments):

Names that have been popping up as Colorado potential candidates: Bryan Harsin, Jeff Tedford, Blake Anderson, Neal Brown, Seth Littrell . . . If Texas Tech makes a move on Kingsbury, which seems like a stronger possibility than 48 hours ago, the candidate pool will probably look similar

I’ll let you do with this what you will, but I think this is probably a pretty good place to start in terms of candidates and I’m sure that there will be some coordinator-types that would also get a look (Brent Venables and Dave Aranda are the two normally mentioned).

A-J Media’s Carlos Silva, Jr. listened to the Big 12 coaches conference call and Baylor’s Matt Rhule is preparing for anything and everything:

“I think the one thing when you play a Kliff Kingsbury team is you expect elite quarterback play no matter who is out there,” Rhule said. “Coach Kingsbury is one of the best of the best in terms of that position. We can’t think too much about because we don’t know who’s going to be out there. We don’t know what capacity they’re going to be out there.”

Miscellaneous . . . San Antonio Express-News’ Nick Talbot writes about the turnaround by Incarnate Word head coach Eric Morris . . .

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