The Texas Tech discourse has officially curdled. Ever since the Red Raiders started flexing one of the heaviest checkbooks in the NIL era — football, baseball, the softball team that just ran through Lubbock — every corner of college sports Twitter has been logged on to complain about Lubbock buying trophies. On Monday's Mostly Sports, Brandon Walker decided he'd heard enough.
BFW pulls the pin on the Texas Tech hate-watch industry from the Mostly Sports desk.
The case is pretty simple, and it's the same case every fan base making a leap in the NIL era has had to argue. The rules changed. Schools that move fast and write checks win. Texas Tech, a program that has spent most of its modern history as the punchline of the Big 12, finally decided to act like a big boy athletic department, and now everyone wants to act like Lubbock kicked a puppy. Jason Williams, riding shotgun in the discourse, told people to grow up about it.
Jason Williams on why hating the Red Raiders for spending the bag is a loser's argument.
You can quibble with whether Texas Tech is actually built to cash all of this in on the field — that's a different argument and a fair one. But the framing that Tech is somehow uniquely gross for participating in a system every program is participating in? That's the part the Mostly Sports crew is calling out, and they're right. Ohio State did it. Oregon did it. Miami baseball did it for a decade with boosters before NIL even had a name. Welcome to the league.
The rest of the episode was the crew making the (correct) case that June is a sneakily great sports month — NBA Finals, Stanley Cup Finals, College World Series, the U.S. Open — and the show feels locked in. Mark Titus also took a victory lap on the OKC Thunder finally exiting his life, which is a separate kind of bread getting buttered.
The hosts make the case for June as the most slept-on month on the calendar.
Bottom line: the Texas Tech pearl-clutching tour has run its course. If the worst thing the Red Raiders did was figure out how to operate in the rules everyone agreed to, then yeah — maybe it is time to shut the fuck up about Texas Tech.