Not sure how to feel about the Texas Tech football team's 35-24 win at Oregon State? You're not alone.
There are mixed feelings about the Red Raiders, who saw their secondary exposed and found their offense still highly inconsistent. Still, you take the dub however you can and figure it out from there.
Right?
Here are the biggest things that stood out from the Red Raiders moving to 2-0 on the season.
Texas Tech football may never play another road game in non-conference
Texas Tech wants to play seven games inside Galaxy Stadium every season. The reason given by athletic director Kirby Hocutt is money, Tech needing to generate as much as it can in the spending era of college athletics.
Perhaps the secret reason is that Texas Tech has yet to perform well in non-conference road games, all games coming in seasons where
the Red Raiders had good expectations on them before the year. The double-overtime blunder at Wyoming. Getting wrecked at Washington State (which gave John Mateer a hefty NIL deal to go to Oklahoma and isn't working out that well for either party) and now the struggle to get out of dodge against a completely rebuilt Oregon State team.
Joey McGuire finally got his first non-conference road win as Texas Tech's head coach. Don't think anybody will be thrilled with how it happened.
J'Koby Williams is your No. 1 running back, plain and simple
Of course, it's not that simple, but it should be. Having a committee of three backs sounds good in theory, until you're rotating them willy nilly to feed everyone, even when one has clearly been the best option. J'Koby Williams is that option. He ran for a 38-yard touchdown on one drive, then didn't see the field on the next series, a three-and-out with two short runs by Quintent Joyner.
The season's already started. The other guys can't transfer out. Ride Williams.
Take some chances on offense, Mack
Conservative play calling is the safe way to do things. Safe is boring and not very Red Raider.
Will Hammond has taken maybe three deep ball chances in the first two games. Two of them resulted in touchdowns, including the go-ahead score to Coy Eakin late in the fourth. I'm not saying wing it just to wing it, but give the receivers a chance to make a play here and there.
Side note: using Thomas Castellanos is good, but they're gonna have to let him throw a bit more to make the setup work. And they did with the late TD throw from Castellanos to Matt Ludwig. More of that.
Let's play the transitive property game
Until we get the head-to-head matchups, the best way to fake our way into knowing what's going to happen is through the use of everyone's favorite piece of property: the transitive property.
Texas Tech barely escaped Oregon State, which almost knocked off Houston, which got a running clock when it decimated Southern.
Meanwhile, future Texas Tech opponent, Oklahoma State, just went ham against Oregon, who Tech lost bad to in the Orange Bowl (different version of the Ducks, but still), a week after getting mauled by Tulsa, who barely hung on to beat Sam Houston, Tech's opponent in Week 4.
Fake news, or is there something to it? We shall see.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Biggest takeaways from Texas Tech football escaping Oregon State
