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I’m taking things a bit easy this week without a football game. It’s always tough this time of year to try to cover football and basketball, especially with me being out of town last week. As an aside, this Thursday, the 20th, Texas Tech will be quite busy.

• Soccer will be playing North Carolina in Ft. Worth as part of the 2nd round of the NCAA Tournament.
• The Lady Raiders basketball will host Mississippi State.
• Volleyball is at Baylor.
• Texas Tech basketball is in the Bahamas and will play Wake Forest.

On the Hardwood

ESPN on each AP Top 25 team:

15. Texas Tech Red Raiders
Previous ranking: 11

2025-26 record: 3-1

Stat to know: In Tech’s first ever meeting against Illinois, JT Toppin had 35 points and 11 rebounds. It was his fifth career 30-point game with the Red Raiders, the most by any Texas Tech player in the past 20 seasons and tied for sixth most in program history. It was also his fifth career 30-point double-double, the fourth most in Big 12 history, behind Michael Beasley (13), Kevin Durant (7) and Blake Griffin (6).

What’s next: Thursday vs. Wake Forest (Baha Mar Championship), 8:30 p.m., CBSSN

On the Gridiron

The latest installment of The Ride against UCF.

ESPN’s Bill Connelly recaps week 12 and not a ton of Texas Tech mentions, but this is always a great recap of the week. The one big discussion of Texas Tech is pretty fun:

Here are the five teams that saw their ratings rise the most this week:

Nevada: up 4.6 adjusted points per game (ranking rose from 128th to 121st)

Texas Tech: up 3.6 points (from fourth to third)

UConn: up 3.2 points (from 58th to 47th)

Texas State: up 3.0 points (from 98th to 80th)

Virginia: up 3.0 points (from 43rd to 34th)

It’s hard for a team near the top of the ratings to gain a ton of points this late in the year, but Texas Tech’s performance against UCF was so resounding that the Red Raiders nearly rose more than anyone else this week.

Here are some of the key stats if we filter out garbage time:

Yards per play: Tech 8.6 (41 snaps), UCF 2.1 (34 snaps)

Success rate: Tech 68.3%, UCF 23.5%

Yards per successful play: Tech 12.0, UCF 6.8

Pct. of plays gaining 20+ yards: Tech 12.2%, UCF 0.0%

Pct. of plays gaining zero or fewer: Tech 19.5%, UCF 38.2%

Red zone trips: Tech 7, UCF 1

Red zone TD rate: Tech 57.1%, UCF 0.0%

UCF’s one decent non-garbage time drive ended in a David Bailey sack of Tayven Jackson on fourth down. The Red Raiders did whatever they wanted. They probably aren’t as good as Ohio State — I’m resigning myself to the Buckeyes being a hefty title favorite at this point — but I would put them on even ground, at worst, against anyone else in the country.

The Athletic’s Justin Williams asks if two Big 12 teams can get into the CFP:

But what if it’s a Texas Tech-BYU rematch and the Cougars take their second loss of the season? Is a BYU team that enters championship weekend near the bottom of the top 10 with two losses to Texas Tech good enough for an at-large? Maybe, depending on how the other conference races shake out. But the Cougars, whose odds to make the field sit at 33 percent according to The Athletic’s model, won’t get any SEC-style benefit of the doubt. BYU has an impressive win over Utah, but its resume is otherwise lacking, including a weak nonconference slate. It would probably come down to those new scheduling metrics. The more two-loss teams that come out of the SEC and Big Ten, whether they make the conference championship or not, the worse that is for the Big 12.

The wild card is Utah (8-2, 5-2 Big 12), which throttled Baylor 55-28 and currently sits one spot below BYU in the CFP rankings. The Utes have a pair of quality losses to Tech and BYU, but their best wins are at home against Arizona State and Cincinnati. That doesn’t scream “Playoff worthy.”

Yet in a hypothetical scenario where BYU wins out, narrowly defeating Texas Tech in an instant-classic Big 12 championship that sends both teams to the CFP, mixed with utter chaos elsewhere that leaves a pile of three-loss power-conference teams in its wake … could 10-2 Utah sneak into the Playoff as an at-large for a three-bid Big 12?