So much about winning football games is avoiding mistakes and capitalizing on opportunities, and the 1980 Texas Tech football team was a classic case in point. The Red Raiders, in Rex Dockery's final season in Lubbock, went 5-6, but could have done so much more. The meltdowns, crazy errors, and blown opportunities were of such magnitude to make this perhaps the most frustrating seasons in modern Texas Tech football history.
The tone was set in week two when No. 15 North Carolina visited Jones Stadium. On two separate occasions the Red Raiders were set up inside the UNC 10-yard line and came away with no points. On one occasion Ron Reeves threw an interception and on another he made a wild pitch on an option play that was recovered by a Tarheel. Texas Tech lost that televised game (in 1980 it was a rare treat to see a Red Raider football game on the boob toob), 9-3.
Incidentally, that North Carolina team had a guy named Lawrence Taylor at linebacker and a pair of superb running backs in "Famous" Amos Lawrence and Kelvin Bryant. The latter was the backup to Texas Tech's Timmy Smith when he set a Super Bowl rushing record that still stands for the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl XXII.
The Baylor game, which took place on September 27 in Lubbock, was one in which Texas Tech made unforgiveable mistakes, which, had Dockery not accepted the job at Memphis State, would have justified firing him. In short, on not one but two occasions, a Texas Tech deep snapper hiked the ball over punter Maury Buford's head and out of the end zone for safeties. As a result, the Bears led this game 4-0 at halftime and went on to win, 11-3, with third-string quarterback Mike Brannan carrying the load for most of the game. It was raining for much of this game, but that's no excuse for those two safeties.
Baylor, incidentally, went undefeated in SWC play that year, and Texas Tech had as good a shot at knocking them off as anybody. As it was, this was Baylor's first win in Jones Stadium since 1966.
Yet another gut punch came against TCU in Fort Worth. For three quarters the Red Raiders dominated this game and led 17-0 going into the fourth quarter. But what followed was as terrible a meltdown as has ever occurred in Texas Tech football history. The Horned Frogs rattled off 24 unanswered points, 21 on long touchdown passes from Steve Stamp, to stun the Red Raiders, 24-17. The winning score was an 82-yard shot to Stanley Washington with 1:29 to play. This would be TCU's lone win in SWC play for 1980.
The final floundering in futility came on the road at Arkansas in the last game of the season. The Razorbacks won the game, 22-16. But the Red Raiders, trailing 22-14 and with a chance to tie it up very late in the game, saw Reeves throw an interception in the Razorback end zone from the nine-yard line to seal their fate. A big part of the story in 1980 was failure in the red zone and turnovers in general.
But, as miserable as these losses were, the 1980 season also held a couple of marvelous highlights. The first, on November 1, came at the expense of the Texas Longhorns. The Red Raiders jolted the Horns badly, storming to a 24-0 lead early in the second quarter. But what looked like a surprising rout instead turned extremely tense when UT rang up 20 points before halftime to make the score 24-20. With all those pyrotechnics the second half was sure to be wild, right? Well, maybe it was, but not in the way everybody expected. Neither ballclub put up a single point the rest of the game and the Red Raiders held on for a most bizarre upset.
A couple of random points about this game: I listened to Jack Dale's call of it with my dad while fishing on a dock at White River Lake east of Lubbock. And second, Ted Watts, who had an interception return for a touchdown, played most of this game with a broken jaw.
The other glorious moment came against No. 18 SMU in a frigid Jones Stadium. The Red Raiders scored two second-quarter touchdowns and made it stick for a 14-0 win. Texas Tech's defense held Eric Dickerson and Craig James to 161 yards and stopped Dickerson on 4th-and-inches on the Red Raider doorstep to preserve a shutout. Ron Reeves, incidentally, passed Tom Wilson as Texas Tech's all-time passing yardage leader in this game. Suffice it to say, it's a record he no longer holds.
The 1980 Red Raiders were a team that had the talent to finish far better than 5-6. To wit, has the program ever had a better tandem of safeties than Ted Watts and Tate Randle? The answer is a resounding no. But, instead of finishing perhaps 8-2-1, the club recorded Texas Tech's second-straight losing season. There were more where that came from.