Just wanted to touch on a few things from the Matt Wells presser this afternoon.
- Coach Wells was asked about with all the talk of realignment going around what would his message be to the Texas Tech fans in terms of showing up to football games this year:
- Attendance has always been extremely important. To have a home field advantage and a home field crowd is one of the things in college football that can actually make a difference in the score and the outcome and the life of your team. Our fans are the best, they’ve always turned out. Now I believe coming off of Covid and how we were only able to have 25%, it’s more important than ever in this area of realignment that we’re in now. People are watching and people are looking at us and how we respond to it. It’s not only important for our football team but it’s important for West Texas. It’s important for our businesses, and our communities, and for our people here in West Texas because of the atmosphere, the gameday atmosphere. So it affects more than our team, it’s the people in the community, in Lubbock, and West Texas and now it’s personal, it really is. It’s now time for West Texans, Red Raiders to all wrap our arms around each other and kind of bow up against a little adversity and show out and show the country what West Texas and Texas Tech is all about.
- I asked Coach Wells what are some of the better position battles going on in fall camp right now:
- “Kicker, y’all don’t want to talk about that but I do. Quarterback, we’ve got better Quarterbacks in this program. I would say you’re looking at who’s going to be the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th linebacker, same thing in the defensive backfield. We’ve got young wideouts competing. I think a lot of those wideouts are going to play and really that playing time is probably going to be week to week and it’s probably going to go off game performance because they’re all good enough to play in games right now."
- Coach Wells was asked how this team has improved over the last two seasons from when he first got to Lubbock until now:
- “So many different ways I could talk about our players. The buy-in, the accountability off the field, what we do academically, what we do in the weight room, but the first thing that comes to my mind is practice. The first year, and I know the first spring I just kept talking about we have to learn how to practice. Often times you guys would say well what do you mean by that and I would just talk about too much pre snap, too many pre snap penalties, post snap fighting, guys really coming out not prepared for practice mentally and emotionally, the effort and the strain is something I rarely talk about any more. So that to me is one of the biggest jumps we’ve made in two years is really learning how to practice.”
