Texas Tech’s 6-0 start doesn’t come with the same runaway feel as last season, but the No. 8 Red Raiders are still unbeaten, still climbing, and still part of a Big 12 picture that suddenly looks crowded at the top.
A year after rolling to the school’s first Big 12 championship and reaching the College Football Playoff, Texas Tech has taken a different route to the same record. The wins haven’t all been blowouts.
The defense has been reshaped. And quarterback Will Hammond has become a central figure in a team that just keeps finding answers.
That was on display again in a 53-25 win over Arizona State, the lone Big 12 team to beat Texas Tech last season.
“Our guys just keep responding, and that’s what you’re supposed to do,” coach Joey McGuire said. “They just keep finding ways to win.”
McGuire has hammered home the same message to his team that Kalani Sitake uses at No. 2 BYU: stay in the moment, worry about what’s next, and don’t get distracted by the bigger picture. It’s the kind of line every coach leans on, but in a wild season across college football, it has clearly stuck with both programs.
“We have too much in front of us,” McGuire said. “We still are nowhere close to the team that we can be, and so to focus on anything other than the football and going 1-0, no matter who we’re playing, I think would start taking away from what we’re trying to do.”
The Big 12 now has three unbeaten teams in Texas Tech, BYU and No. 10 Utah, giving the league three 6-0 teams for the first time since 2015.
That also means the conference owns half of the remaining undefeated teams in the FBS. The others are No.
1 Miami, No. 9 UCLA and James Madison.
BYU added to that picture by beating then-No. 2 Notre Dame at home and moving to 6-0 for the third straight season. The Cougars were the Big 12 runner-up last year, with their only two losses coming against Texas Tech.
Utah is also unbeaten, making this the rare season when the Big 12 has multiple teams still perfect deep into October.
Sitake, asked about BYU’s rise to its highest ranking since its 1984 national championship season, didn’t take the bait.
“Really excited about the progress we’ve made as a team,” he said.
“I never cared about it before, so why would I start now,” he responded. “We’re talking about humble and hungry.
Talking about rankings isn’t gonna get us there. So we are halfway through the season.”
BYU is doing it without injured running back LJ Martin, last season’s AP Big 12 offensive player of the year. He went down with a lower-body injury in the first quarter at TCU on Oct. 3 and could be out until mid-November.
Texas Tech’s path to 6-0 has been more uneven than last year’s march. The Red Raiders opened with a 33-10 win over Football Championship Subdivision team Abilene Christian, then had to rally at Oregon State with two touchdowns in the final 6 1/2 minutes.
Their Big 12 opener finished 28-26 after No. 14 Houston came up inches short on a 2-point conversion try in the final minute of its only loss.
Then came a 29-7 win at Colorado after John Curry’s interception in the end zone turned into a touchdown while Tech was still trailing late in the third quarter.
“I keep saying it, everybody keeps asking me and they’re wanting us to look this way and this way. I don’t care how we look, just win. Just win,” McGuire said.
That mindset fits the numbers. Last season’s Red Raiders won 12 games by an average margin of nearly 35 points, and none was closer than 22.
Their only regular-season defeat was 26-22 at Arizona State before they won six more in a row and eventually fell to Oregon in the Orange Bowl. This year has brought more friction, but the results are the same.
Saturday against Arizona State, the tone changed fast. Fourth-year starting linebacker Ben Roberts opened the scoring with a pick-6, and Texas Tech followed by scoring on seven straight drives to build a 43-10 halftime lead. Arizona State, the 2024 Big 12 champion, had already allowed 55 points at home to Baylor, which later lost 17-6 to TCU.
The Red Raiders’ defense has been one of the season’s biggest surprises in terms of personnel turnover. Six of Texas Tech’s school-record nine NFL draft picks last April came from that side of the ball, and the new group has already produced major plays, including a trio of linebackers who have returned interceptions for touchdowns.
Hammond has been steady since coming back from the torn right ACL he suffered last October. He has 1,334 passing yards and six touchdowns, and over his last 2 1/2 games he has thrown 68 passes without an interception. That streak started after he had three picks in the second quarter of a 49-14 win over Sam Houston, a game in which Tech transfer linebacker Austin Romaine became the first FBS player since 2013 to return two interceptions for touchdowns on consecutive passes.
The Big 12’s current unbeaten run also carries a bit of historical weight. It has been more than 20 years since a Big 12 team finished undefeated. The only teams to do it in the league’s previous 30 seasons were Nebraska in 1997, Oklahoma in 2000 and Texas in 2005.
TCU in 2022 and Kansas State in 1998 are the only current Big 12 programs to complete a regular season without a conference loss, and both of those teams lost the conference championship game in overtime.
BYU and Utah still have their annual Holy War showdown coming Nov. 7 in Salt Lake City. Texas Tech won’t face either team in the regular season.
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