The Assignment

Good Guys: Texas Tech Red Raiders (1-0, 0-0)
Bad Guys: Kent State Golden Flashes (1-0, 0-0)
Where: Jones AT&T Stadium | Lubbock, Texas
When: Saturday, September 6th @ 11:00 am
TV & Streaming: TNT | HBO Max
Radio: The Varsity Network
The Line: Texas Tech -48.5
Game Notes: Texas Tech | Kent State
Weather Report: Partly Cloudy, High 78, Low 64

Kent State squeaked by the Merrimack Warriors, 21-17 on Saturday thanks to a 100-yard kick return late in the 4th quarter. The Golden Flashes only had 308 total yards of offense and 209 of them came in the air where they were incredibly efficient, going 12 of 19 and 11 yards per attempt. We’ll get to more Kent State players and stats on Friday, but Kent State only has an interim head coach. The prior head coach, Kenni Burns, was placed on administrative leave in April without a reason given, but according to the Akron Beacon Journal Burns had a series of loans without any interest accruing. Burns went 1-23 during his two seasons, so it’s not as if he was lighting things on fire. Thus, your interim Kent State coach is Mark Carney, who was the offensive coordinator and tight ends coach in 2023. The new OC is Clay Patterson, where he cut his teeth at South Florida and Minnesota as position coaches. The defensive coordinator is Cherokee Valeria, he bounced around at Sacramento State prior to arriving at KSU.

The News:

Non-Transcript:

• Behren Morton: Saving grace was that his ankle turned, really sore, but the x-rays and MRI are negative. More muscle soreness. Day by day, get him going tomorrow and has been in multiple times today. Gear him back a little if he’s not 100%. If he feels great, then we plan on playing him. We saw how he and Mack Leftwich are aligned and don’t want to disrupt that and want to make sure the quarterback is in rhythm and healthy. If he’s healthy enough to play then we’ll come out and see what he can do. He was coming out of the game, just not like that. Will Hammond has been successful, if he has to start then we feel good about that. We feel good about getting out the soreness.
• Green Dot: Saturday was new with them being on the headset and interesting on hearing them and Rob Greene was the main one communicating. We have vets with BJ and Cole who have played a lot of football. I asked Shiel Wood and he thought it was the cleanest 1st game he’s been a part of and felt the same way.
• Takeaways: Wanted to get the win and felt that we were dominant. Had 2 pre-snap penalties, one on the left tackle and one on David Bailey and nose guard and least amount of pre-snap penalties in 31 years.
• Miquel Dingle Injury: Hate that for him and he was just getting back. Can play John Curry and AJ McCarty is fully back, probably a week away from Marcus Ramon-Edwards and he’s the 3rd star. Oliver Miles, BJ Jordan has started games, and Payton and Oliver, have a lot of depth.
• Every week we introduce the speed of the game and this is times and it’s black and white and we’ll go over that. We want to eliminate pre-snap penalties, 1st series didn’t leverage the football well. Behren got hit 3 times, 1 time was lack of communication between the center and guard, 1 time was a lazy rep by the right tackle, and the low hit, both linebackers Cameron Dickey got there late. Just attack the critical errors.
• Transfers: Reggie Virgil is explosive and Terrance Carter is such a matchup problem, we did go back and go over how we don’t stretch the football ever unless it is the last play of the game, 4th down or 2-point conversion. Pleased with the new guys, Skyler Gill-Howard, Lee Hunter, Romello Height, Amier Boyd, Cole Wisniewski.
• Running backs: Expected Cam and J’Koby to do what they did, J’Koby’s track coach said that his trail leg was lazy. Before the game, asked Adam Hill what he weighed and he was 230 and wanted them to feel all 230 pounds, he ran downhill and was physical. He’s been running with the 3’s and that’s tough because the freshmen are tough and going up against tough defenders. Ended the game with 4 freshmen offensive linemen and 1 redshirt freshmen.
• Was pleased with the tubas and band was incredible.
• Continue to emphasize not to play bad football, did play a clean game for a 1st game. Challenged our guys to get better every game. Can lose games early in the season because of bad football. Have 2 examples of bad football and things we can show the team and learn from other teams.
• Always cheering for opponents to win and want to play great teams. Thing that’s not acceptable is to not play with full effort and we will play hard on Saturday and am fired up for Kent State and those players.
• Kickers: Kenny Perry did a great job of getting them in. Stone has a chance to lead the nation in kickbacks. Ian Hershey was asked not to kick into the endzone. Had 2 field goals. Jack Burgess has been in 2 games with his family here and they have not gotten to see him punt, joked that they will fly them out every week because we don’t want to see him punt.
• Players having played Kent State: Will talk to Reggie Virgil, Will Jados, Vinny Scuirry have all played Kent State. They have a new OC and DC and lots of new players.
• Patrick McMath: The legacy that the new guys are going to leave is what the pour into those young players, Howard Sampson has poured into McMath and he’s done a great job with his weight and is close to 290 right now. Play him at guard and center, he had some high snaps on Tuesday and he responded and got extra snaps on his own. The two we were planning on playing were McMath and Connor Carty, Danilo Guberinich and Elias Gillen and we feel strongly about freshmen receivers and offensive line and have good evaluations about them.

Education: This week’s education is all of the different offensive philosophies described in 27 minutes.

Needs Fixin’: I copied and pasted this to force myself to think about things to be critical of in a 60-point victory. These are very minor in the grand scheme of things, but wanted to consider things to clean up before Kent State.

• The offensive line maybe needs to work a bit on consistency, there were times where I thought that the group was dominant, but consistency is always a thing and I thought there were times that they weren’t hitting their blocks. And on the Dickey touchdown, I wanted them to just maul their way into an easy touchdown and that wasn’t the case.
• Staying along the lines, I thought there were some running lanes that weren’t completely cleaned up. It’s the first game and after the game Skyler Gill-Howard mentioned that he missed a couple of spots. The ability to be cognizant of the need to be in the right place is a good sign.
• Special teams blocking was an issue and I am all but sure that Kenny Perry will correct that. Unnecessary holding penalties is just not something that I think the staff will tolerate.

So Fast: I was really impressed with the offense. I started to want to write about the receivers, but then I thought that the whole thing hummed really nicely, from top to bottom. Thinking more about how Mack Leftwich has said that there’s no trick plays in his bag, the offense is going to be the offense and although I am sure that tweaks are made during the week and weaknesses are identified and attempted to be exploited against opposing teams, my guess is that the offense is the offense, for good or for bad. As you may recall, back in the day, when it didn’t work, it was a disaster and a frustrating day overall. I’ll be interested to see how Leftwich reacts to bumps in the road.

Alert: Do you play Morton? I know that McGuire said that he’s just sore and they will see. Texas Tech is a 45 point favorite and by all respects, Texas Tech should win this game pretty easily. Does it make sense to let him get fully healthy, playing the long game of a Big 12 Championship in clear view. If you ask Morton, I’m sure he will say heck no, but with this there’s no clear thing to delineate what is injured or not and if it is muscle soreness then could that affect mobility, which would then possibly affect something else in the future?

The Chat: I thought Ted Emrich and Jeff Woody were fantastic on the call on Saturday night. Woody is a former Iowa State running back and I thought he explained things in a clear and concise manner and he really understood the offense. Never perfect, but really good. I know it’s totally cool to be tough on announcers, but I thought the tandem of Emrich and Woody were terrific.