Texas Tech’s Balanced Attack Has the Red Raiders Dreaming Big in 2025

A unique cast has Texas Tech in pursuit of a dream season.

Name a college football team that ranks in the top six in scoring offense and defense, boasts a road win over an opponent currently in the AP Top 25 and has gone decades since last winning a conference championship.

If you said Indiana, you’re correct. And since the Hoosiers’ 30-20 defeat of Oregon in Week 7, they have deservedly dominated headlines.

But if you answered Texas Tech, give yourself an emphatic Guns Up. The Red Raiders have thus far matched Indiana’s surprise first half of the 2025 season, only without the same fanfare.

That might be the toll of the Big 12 Conference’s lower national profile than that of the Big Ten, or perhaps because Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire isn’t the meme factory that head Hoosier Curt Cignetti has become.

Whatever the explanation, the Red Raiders warrant a greater share of the spotlight. It may only be a matter of time before they force their way into it.

Texas Tech visits reigning Big 12 champion Arizona State in Week 8, the third road game in a four-game stretch for the Red Raiders. This matchup of the defending champ and potential new front-runner lost some of its luster last Saturday when the Sun Devils were roughed up at Utah, 42-10.

But with Texas Tech having opened its spell of three road games in four dates by blowing out that same Utah team, 34-10, the Red Raiders go into Tempe having already made a statement.

In 2025, the road to the Big 12 championship goes through Lubbock.

It’s been a long time since that’s been the case; 17 years, if you take it back to when the peak of the celebrated Mike Leach era resulted in a three-way tie atop the conference’s old South division. However, with the tiebreaker belonging to Oklahoma, Texas Tech missed out on the Big 12 Championship Game and thus any claim to a league title.

It was 1994 when a Red Raiders team last split a championship, dating back to the dying days of the old Southwest Conference. But at 4-3 in a preposterous five-team tie with Baylor, Rice, Texas and TCU, and 6-1 Texas A&M ineligible for claiming the title due to NCAA sanctions, it’s hardly a championship in any real sense.

For Texas Tech’s last outright conference championship, one has to go back 70 years to 1955 and the Border Conference. Saturday’s meeting with Arizona State is a renewal of a series dating back to the Border Conference, but other members of the long-defunct league included present-day Div. II West Texas A&M and Div. III Hardin-Simmons.

The 2025 Red Raiders still have half their schedule to finish before a hypothetical trip to Arlington, Texas, for the Big 12 Championship Game, and the back-half of their docket includes a Nov. 8 showdown with fellow unbeaten BYU. Should both teams hold serve, it could be the most important game in the season-and-a-half of the new-look Big 12.

It also has the potential to be Texas Tech’s most significant game since hosting Oklahoma on Nov. 22, 2008. The Red Raiders were ostensibly playing for their national championship lives that night in a disappointing, 65-21 loss that bumped them from the BCS hunt.

With the introduction of the College Football Playoff and its expansion a year ago, this Texas Tech team has a wider margin for error. Considering how the Red Raiders have played thus far, though, they may not need it.

Their 47.5-point per game production is second in the nation; and while high-scoring offenses are nothing new in West Texas, these Red Raiders have put up points with a much more grounded attack than in the program’s air-raid days.

Running backs Cameron Dickey and J’Koby Williams, along with specialty quarterback Will Hammond, have shared 183 carries to lead the country’s 11th-most productive rushing attack.

Ironically, the powerful Texas Tech run game isn’t the result of a concerted move away from the program’s air-raid roots. McGuire hired Mack Leftwich as offensive coordinator last winter, a fast-rising assistant who celebrated his 30th birthday last November while on GJ Kinne’s staff at Texas State.

Texas State ranked seventh in scoring offense last season with Leftwich overseeing a version of the run-and-shoot. He previously ran offenses at burgeoning FCS power Incarnate Word, which fostered the rise of 2025 No. 1 NFL draft pick Cam Ward with a potent variation of the air raid.

Leftwich himself told Dave Campbell’s Texas Football earlier this season that he built playbooks based off of Leach’s famed Texas Tech air raid. This is hardly a case of a program purposefully ditching its identity like the ill-fated “There is no option” era of Georgia Southern football.

Coincidentally, though, an intentional move away from an option offense does have a roundabout role in Texas Tech’s breakout season. Defensive coordinator Shiel Wood, also in his first season in Lubbock, spent the first 11 seasons of his college coaching career alongside Mike Ayers at Wofford.

The flexbone-devotee Ayers retired after coaching Wofford to eight FCS Playoffs — seven of which Wood was on the staff for — and the Terriers moved away from the scheme. Wood then traveled around working with defenses on other option-based programs, Georgia Tech in Paul Johnson’s final season and Army, and with Willie Fritz at Tulane and Houston.

Perhaps it’s a credit to all the run-game variations Wood’s been opposite in practices, but his defenses the last four seasons at Troy, Tulane, Houston and now Texas Tech all held opponents to fewer yards per carry.

The Red Raiders’ 2.1 yield this season fuels a nation-leading 62.5 rushing yard per-game allowance. At a place long synonymous with offense, this defense could be Texas Tech’s key to contending for the national championship.

However, as linebacker and leading tackler Jacob Rodriguez put it after the rout of Utah, the Red Raiders’ real strength is how each phase is interconnected.

“Everybody — offense, defense and special teams — we all care about each other,” he said. “The truth is, we have a great team. We have a great defense, we have a great offense, we have a great special teams. So no matter the adversity we face in a game, we know that truth.”