Lubbock, Texas — TCU is looking to come out strong after their bye week against the Texas Tech Red Raiders, but let’s get one thing straight: this isn’t going to be an easy win for the Horned Frogs. Kansas State dominated TCU 41-3 in the game before the bye week, leaving a lot of question marks around this team. The biggest question is consistency. You never know what TCU team is going to show up game to game, which makes it hard to predict any scores. On paper, after the convincing BYU win, it looked like it could be a new era of football under quarterback Josh Hoover, but due to a lack of offensive line, he could not put up the numbers he did against the Cougars.
Texas Tech comes into this game 3-5 overall. Behren Morton returns to the lineup after being injured during the Kansas State game. Having him back in at quarterback can help eliminate the turnover issue that Tech has had in previous games with true freshman Jake Strong in the game. Strong was not a bad option for the Raiders; he just is not as experienced as Morton, which can lead to bad turnovers. Strong was picked off six times while only playing a total of six quarters. The addition of Morton to the lineup can add more passing yards for this offense, which could be detrimental to the TCU defense. TCU has been extremely inconsistent defensively, going from struggling in the secondary to great on the run game to the next matchup completely vice versa. If Tech can utilize both their running game and passing game, this could be a tough matchup for the Horned Frog defense.
TCU’s offense has shown in bursts what they can do and the types of numbers they can put up, but without pass protection, you won’t see much production offensively. Josh Hoover is a great pocket passer but doesn’t utilize his running ability as much as Chandler Morris does. If TCU can protect Hoover, he will have a field day targeting his big targets like JP Richardson, but if this doesn’t happen, they will have to rely on Emani Bailey for all their production on the ground, and as we saw a couple weeks ago, you need more than just a successful run game.
Kickoff is set for 6:00pm CST in Lubbock,Texas.
