This bowl week unlike any other for Texas Tech football | Williams
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Three years ago in Houston, the Texas Tech football team beat Ole Miss in the bowl and beat the Rebels just as badly in the bowl before the bowl.
How’s that again?
Everyone remembers, or can easily look up, Tech’s winning the Texas Bowl 42-25 over an Ole Miss team with Jaxson Dart and Quinshon Judkins, future first- and second-round picks in the NFL draft. Two nights before, the Red Raiders downed the Rebs five events to two in the Rodeo Bowl, the campy competition of rodeo-style events conducted each year in the lead-up to the game.
Our account began with this: “Behren Morton dove to grab a ribbon from a calf’s tail. When the Texas Tech quarterback failed, he scrambled to his feet and snatched it on his second try, stopping the clock at NRG Arena.
Trey Wolff, having dropped to his knees in pursuit of another calf, was fortunate not to get hit by a set of flying hooves.
Jacob Rodriguez sprinted from one end of NRG Arena to the other with a stuffed toy horse around his waist as part of a winning Texas Tech relay team.
Then-Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, never at a loss for words, said, “We don’t have a lot of Texas players, so we got beat a little bit at the rodeo. We didn’t have a really good plan.”
There’ll be no such hijinks this week in and around Miami Gardens, Florida, at least not among the players. It’s all business in the College Football Playoff, of which the Orange Bowl matching Texas Tech against Oregon on New Year’s Day is a quarterfinal game.
“Obviously, this is a little more exciting,” Tech center Sheridan Wilson said. “We’ve got a lot more on the line. We know if we win, we get to move on. We’ve always taken it very, very seriously, but we know we’re playing for something bigger here.”
In any other year and nearly any other bowl game, Tech players would be balancing football with fun, more or less a mandate with host cities’ bowl committees. The men in the brightly colored blazers want the players, next week and years from now, to remember something from their bowl trip besides the game. The banquets. The FCA breakfasts. The charitable visits. The tours of places that make a city unique.
This week in sunny south Florida? For Red Raiders players, the only events scheduled outside the team hotel are a media-day requirement on Tuesday and practice on Tuesday and Wednesday at Florida Atlantic.
Not an indictment of the Orange Bowl. Just how it has to be in the CFP.
In most years and most bowls, the host city wants the teams to show up six or seven days for a full week of practice and things to do each day.
This year? The Red Raiders were booked to fly in on Monday for the game on Thursday.
“I kind of wish we were going a day later than we were, treat it like a normal game,” linebacker Ben Roberts said. “I’m just going to sit in the hotel and watch film and get ready.”
Compare that to bowl experiences of Texas Tech players in years past.
During Holiday Bowl week, everyone went to Naval Base San Diego for a dinner aboard an enormous ship. In San Diego and in conjunction with the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio, there were hours carved out for Sea World. Same in Orlando at Magic Kingdom, a diversion from Tangerine Bowl prep.
Teams visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute before the 2017 Birmingham Bowl.
This year will be Texas Tech’s fifth straight to play in a bowl game, so the longer-tenured Red Raiders have had their share of experiences. The buildup to last year’s Liberty Bowl included a team welcome party at Dave & Buster’s and a Memphis Grizzlies game. Scene-setting two years ago for the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, Louisiana, featured a shindig with Louisiana cuisine — cooked hog and bacon-wrapped gator and, on another day, a tour at Barksdale Air Force Base.
The event the Red Raiders kept going back to, when I asked them on Sunday, though, was the night they got to play cowboy in Houston.
“We know we’re probably not going to do the same stuff as normal bowl games,” Wilson said, “but I remember the Texas Bowl, doing the rodeo. I thought that was a lot of fun, being one to throw the hay bales, Coy (Eakin) doing the roping.”
Morton seconded that: “We’ve got a lot of West Texas boys,” he said. “so to get Coy out there roping and then us getting the ribbon off the calf, I thought it was pretty cool. That was a good time.”
This week, the game faces go on early. The extent of the Red Raiders’ good time boils down solely to what happens after kickoff on Thursday.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: This bowl week unlike any other for Texas Tech football | Williams
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