said<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019m sure because Texas has got a lot of money, they can buy their contract out, but I do know there\u2019s a lot of Red Raiders that could help them buy that contract out if they don\u2019t want to, and they can come to Lubbock in Week 1 and figure out if their twos and threes can win this conference.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cI do know that Cody Campbell reached out to Stephen Jones, so if they don\u2019t want to come to Lubbock, then we\u2019re going to work on trying to get to AT&T Stadium. So if they want to play Week 1, we\u2019re ready. We would love to play the University of Texas.\u201d<\/p>\n
After McGuire\u2019s challenge, Campbell stepped in again, offering to cover the buyout for Texas\u2019 season opener against Texas State.<\/p>\n
The problem is that the offer from the Red Raiders is not just fundamentally unserious, it actively disregards the point that Sarkisian was making \u2014 the Texas head coach didn\u2019t say that the Horns could beat the Raiders with their two and threes, he said they could beat the teams on the embarrassingly poor schedule Texas Tech is set to play in 2026, a combination of exceedingly unambitious non-conference games with the nine-game slate provided by the extraordinarily diluted Big 12 Conference.<\/p>\n
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And that\u2019s one notable aspect of this whole discussion.<\/p>\n
When the Big 12 was first diluted by departures from Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Texas A&M, Texas responded with aggressive non-conference scheduling that resulted in home-and-home series against Notre Dame, USC, LSU, Alabama, Michigan, and Ohio State.<\/p>\n
When the Longhorns and the Sooners left for the SEC, the Red Raiders had plenty of time to add legitimate non-conference opponents and opted against it, but now want Texas to solve the problem it created by being afraid of scheduling legitimate programs just because Sarkisian called them out publicly.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t take it from me \u2014 consider the opinion of an Aggie.<\/p>\n
From the unsurprisingly warped perspective of the Texas Tech fanbase, the unwillingness of Texas to schedule another series against its former conference opponent is a sign that the Longhorns are scared, an opinion sharply at odds with the program\u2019s longtime scheduling philosophy that is now in the spotlight because the College Football Playoff committee left three-loss Texas out of the 12-team field last December despite three top-10 wins, a top-10 schedule, and head-to-head wins over two teams that did make the playoff. Two of the three losses by the Horns also came against teams selected for the CFP.<\/p>\n
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Because the committee claims to value strength of schedule and head-to-head competition in its selection criteria, Sarkisian and the Texas administration have been frustrated by the massive chasm between how the committee says it evaluates teams and how they actually make their selections.<\/p>\n
Hence the dig at the one-loss Tech team that made the playoff after plowing through a laughable schedule only to get run out of the playoff by Oregon in an embarrassing performance. Might that not happen again in this season after playing another bad schedule?<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the unserious nature of what McGuire is actually proposing \u2014 for Texas to give up one of its home games that season ticket holders have already paid for to go play Texas Tech in Lubbock or in Arlington, raising the question of why the Red Raiders aren\u2019t willing to come play the Longhorns in Austin.<\/p>\n
With a non-conference game against Ohio State highlighting a schedule that ranks No. 3 nationally by CFN, Texas doesn\u2019t need to bolster its resume and certainly isn\u2019t scared of playing a high-profile opponent, a standard that Tech arguably doesn\u2019t even rise to just because it had one good season against a bad schedule.<\/p>\n
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So why isn\u2019t McGuire willing to come to Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium to play the Horns?<\/p>\n
Perhaps it\u2019s because of the resounding 57-7 beatdown that Texas leveled against Texas Tech in its last trip to the Forty Acres. Perhaps it\u2019s because the Longhorns have dominated the all-time series 55-18. Perhaps it\u2019s because Texas is 32-7 against Texas Tech in Austin.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s not even mentioning a legitimate tertiary reason for the Horns to never schedule another game in Lubbock again \u2014 the abominable behavior of the Red Raiders fans on and off the field during the last trip in 2022 that featured numerous off-field altercations and a field storming that resulted in fans making contact with visiting players, an unsafe situation that the scarlet and black goons comprising the Tech fanbase would only be too happy to recreate were their wildest dreams to come true in September.<\/p>\n
After leaving the Big 12, the Longhorns are off to bigger and better things. And if Texas Tech actually has ambitions of legitimacy, Campbell and McGuire should go call other programs if they actually care about fixing their garbage non-conference schedules. The Texas slate is already set.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Steve Sarkisian issued the initial volley against the Texas Tech Red Raiders. And Joey McGuire has responded with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313457,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[17968,1888,3231,27,29,537,28,1769,415],"class_list":["post-313456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-cody-campbell","tag-joey-mcguire","tag-steve-sarkisian","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-longhorns","tag-texas-news","tag-texas-tech","tag-texas-tech-red-raiders"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}