Texas Tech is good. Good enough to play into April again. On Wednesday night, the Red Raiders ran away from visiting Utah early and stayed there, winning by a final score of 88-74. JT Toppin played as a reigning and likely future Big 12 player of the year should, with 31 points and 13 rebounds, and seven assists.
Tech is now 13-4, ranked 15th in the ESPN coaches poll, and 3-1 in the Big 12, easily the strongest college hoops confederation in the land. Big games come in bunches for the Red Raiders these days. They beat then-third-ranked Duke by a point in Madison Square Garden over the holidays in the thrillingest regular season game I’d seen in years. There’s another biggie Saturday, with Tech hosting 11th ranked BYU. This Red Raiders roster is as deep as Lubbock is flat. Sophomore superstar-in-waiting Christian Anderson put up 26 points and 10 assists on Wednesday night. Freshman Jaylen Petty only put up 8 points against the Utes, but he’s had two 20-point games out of the last five.
Tech’s good at lots of stuff now. The softball team came within one win of a softball World Series title last year, and the football team just finished a season with 12 wins, a conference championship, and a high enough seed to get a first-round bye in the playoffs.
Back to me: I went to Tech in the ‘80s, and it’s taken a long time to accept the school’s good at anything, let alone everything. But here we are. Tech football had 12 wins total in my four years there, none of note. (The highlight of my stint in Lubbock was coming close to a big win, against the Eric Dickerson/Craig James top-ranked SMU squad in 1982, only to have the gridiron gods wake up and remind us we’re Texas Tech.) One sign of the school’s not-long-ago standing as a bastion of football futility: Kliff Kingsbury is still living off a reputation as a wizard that he earned just by going 35-40 in six seasons as Tech’s head coach. Getting to play Oregon in a playoff game was foreign; getting our ass whipped felt like home.
Basketball didn’t really exist in my time there. But now hoops tickets that were darn near giveaways in Lubbock, even when Phi Slama Jama and other Southwest Conference powerhouses came to town, are going for what in my day you’d pay for a house on the South Plains. My Red Raiders wouldn’t even be invited to a Garden party, as this year’s squad was, let alone beat Duke in front of a national TV audience. The school’s first and only trip to the National Championship in 2019 was wondrous, mostly because that level of success was as bizarre to Lubbockites as dust storms are to outsiders. That got my kids all in on Tech sports, so recent years on the hardcourt, including the Mac McClung season, have made for really fun and titillating times in the McKenna household. Good things no longer seem impossible or undeserved. Hell, ever since that Duke game we’ve been mulling whether this season’s squad will stick around to the last weekend of March Madness once again. We’re maybe one more big win away from agreeing it will.
There’s a reason for all the recent successes, of course. The winds of change blew into West Texas by design. Talented athletes go to Tech these days for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: because that’s where the money is. As he himself has let everybody know, oil billionaire Cody Campbell opened his wallet for Tech’s NIL fund, and happiness ain’t been Lubbock in the rear-view mirror ever since. Campbell is a Lubbock native who played football at Tech in the early 2000s, so he knows how hard Tech recruiters have it. Along with regularly being called the ugliest city around, it’s also tabbed as the most boring, and among the most dangerous cities in America. Former Tech football coach Tommy Tuberville is a horrible human being and wrong about almost everything, but it’s hard to quibble with the guy’s first impressions of Lubbock.
"You run me off at Auburn and you ship me to Lubbock, Texas,” Tuberville said in 2017, after he’d been fired by Tech. “I'm going to tell you what, that's like going to Siberia. Somebody asked me, 'What's Lubbock look like?' It looked like Iraq."
So Campbell went with the only sure way to convince kids to come there: He overpaid them. Campbell made Lubbock, for all the flat dirt fields surrounding it, look like the greenest pasture there is. According to a preseason report in Sports Illustrated, the Matador Club, the school’s well-heeled booster group overseen by Campbell, spent nearly $30 million in 2025 on NIL for football players, second-most in the country. Campbell just landed University of Cincinnati quarterback Brendan Sorsby for next year’s team with a reported offer of more than $5 million a year, which is more than what several NFL starting quarterbacks make
Campbell, who also serves as chairman of the school’s board of regents, likewise spread his wealth around to other Tech sports programs. He directed an unprecedented $1 million payment to a softball player, pitcher NiJaree Canady, to get the 2024 USA Softball Collegiate Player of the Year from Stanford into a Red Raiders uniform; Tech’s World Series finals appearance came soon after.
Campbell’s largesse benefits basketballers, too: FoxSports reported Toppin got $4 million to stay in Lubbock another year rather than enter the NBA draft. Anderson’s fee hasn’t been made public, but it’s known that the four-star recruit decommitted from Michigan last year to take a two-year pact from Tech.
Yeah, the hyper-monied reality of late-model Tech sports is about as tough to process for an aged Red Raider as the related on-field successes. Throw in that the university just hired a complete douche as chancellor, and I'll probably turn my back on my old school at some point. But, damn, last night was fab. So for now, in tribute to Joe Ely, the recently dead rocker and greatest Lubbockite since Buddy Holly, here’s hoping the road for Tech hoops goes on forever, or at least until April in Indianapolis.
