Texas Tech embraces rare underdog role against Oregon in Orange Bowl
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For the first time perhaps all season, the Texas Tech football team is not expected to have a cakewalk of a game. In fact, the Red Raiders are slight underdogs for their College Football Playoff quarterfinal game against Oregon.
The fifth-seeded Ducks (12-1) haven’t lost since their Oct. 11 home setback to Indiana, which went on to win the Big Ten Championship and is the No. 1 seed in the CFP field. The fourth-seeded Red Raiders (12-1) are on a similar roll, winning their last six games, including another thumping of BYU in the Big 12 title game.
Texas Tech has the defense to compete with any team in the country, but Oregon has a variety of offensive weapons to put that to the test. Not only are the Ducks the favorites in Vegas to take the win in the Orange Bowl, they’re also many pundits’ pick to win the national championship.
Most Texas Tech players say they avoid paying attention to any outside chatter of their games. Ben Roberts doesn’t do social media much. Not everyone is immune to the talk, though, and like the idea that folks are back to doubting what the Red Raiders can do.
“That’s what Coach (Joey) McGuire preaches all the time, that we’re the underdog,” Brice Pollock said, “and no one really has us winning this playoff, so we’re just gonna carry with us the chip on our shoulder, and I think it’s gonna really feed into how we play this game.”
In a sense, the Red Raiders are back to where they started the season, many seeing the obvious talent on the roster but questioning whether it has what it takes to measure up to the best teams in the country.
This, in part, is due to the conference affiliation of the two programs. Oregon is a perennial power out of the Big Ten, which features each of the last two national champions. The Big 12, meanwhile, hasn’t had much success in the CFP since its inception. Oklahoma repeatedly got thumped while Texas and Arizona State have succumbed to close calls in the last two years.
The outlier is TCU, which won a thriller against Michigan in the semifinal, then got humiliated in the championship game against Georgia.
Whether it’s fair to the Red Raiders or not, how they perform in Hardrock Stadium will be a referendum not just on their program, but the Big 12 Conference as a whole.
“I can see how this will show how strong of a conference the Big 12 is,” Roberts said, “and I believe that it is a strong conference. So I think this is a very important game for the Big 12.”
Romello Height has been around the block throughout his college career, including stops at Auburn, USC and Georgia Tech before his time at Texas Tech. Height said that from his experience, all ball is good ball at this level, regardless of the conference.
“This is good football,” Height said. “Football is football everywhere. People try to knock the Canadian league and the XFL, but ball is ball. I just feel like football is football, any conference. Ball is ball and the Big 12 play good football.”
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: How Texas Tech football sees being underdogs against Oregon in CFP
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