Good morning. Media day is tomorrow and football practice starts on Wednesday. I still have two preseason previews to publish, UCF and West Virginia, that I’ll get to this week. The offseason is really over and it seemingly goes by quicker each year.
On the Hardwood
Lady Raider basketball/Team USA fell to a deeper China team, 81-69, earning the silver medal in the FISU World University Games. Of all things, Denae Fritz was cold from the field as was Jalynn Bristow. Sidney Love scored 15 with 5 assists. If I had one request for the upcoming year it would be for this team to reduce turnovers. You can’t control a lot of things, but you can try to control turnovers.
CBS Sports with the next coach to win a NCAA Championship and Isaac Trotter thinks Grant McCasland is on the list:
Texas Tech’s investment into basketball is real and sustainable. Giving a sharp roster-building coach like McCasland the resources to compete with the big dawgs in the college basketball ecosystem is a cheat code. McCasland and his staff have evaluated talent as well as anybody in the country, both from the transfer portal and the high school ranks. Texas Tech runs smart schemes on both ends of the floor, and McCasland has beaten his preseason KenPom ranking in each of the nine years he’s been a Division I head coach, using both elite defenses at North Texas and an elite offense at Texas Tech this past season.
He’s adaptable and flexible, which is everything in this new era of college basketball.
Bites at the apple are vital to win a championship. Texas Tech has everything it needs to keep putting itself in position to make a run year after year. Eventually, it’s going to click. — Isaac Trotter
CBS Sports’ Isaac Trotter and ESPN’s Myron Medcalf and Jeff Borzello had articles on 100 things to look forward to this season being about 100 days out of the start of the season. Lots of Texas Tech mentions in each article, more in the CBS Sports article, and they are fun reads in preparation of the season.
On the Gridiron
Pro Football Focus previews Texas Tech football!
The Athletic breaks down all 136 quarterbaks into tiers and Texas Tech’s Behren Morton is in Tier 3 and 27th overall, between TAMU’s Marcel Reed and North Carolina’s Gio Lopez. They also dive a bit deeper into the Big 12 and Morton is 8th overall, between Utah’s Devon Dampier and Kansas’ Jalon Daniels. I’ll end with The Athletic’s Antonio Morales who has his most fascinating and Morton makes that list as well:
What can’t be argued is that the spending places significant pressure on several key figures within Texas Tech’s program, including head coach Joey McGuire. For all the money the Red Raiders spent, one position they did not address was quarterback.
Morton posted solid numbers last season: 3,335 passing yards, 27 touchdowns and eight interceptions while completing 63.3 percent of his passes. Morton isn’t viewed as a top-five QB in the Big 12 (he’s eighth in the conference in our rankings). Still, with the improved roster, expectations are much higher this year — winning the Big 12 for the first time at a program that has never finished ranked in the top 10, which puts a lot of pressure on Morton to deliver for a program and fan base that is now striving for more.