It might be tough for some to wrap their heads around how long it has been since Texas Tech football won a conference title. In fact, the 2025 season will be the 31st since the last time the Red Raiders won a share of a conference crown.
What’s more, some believe that the 1994 title should come with an asterisk. That’s because the team with the best record in the old Southwest Conference that year was Texas A&M, which went 6-0-1 in league games. However, because the Aggies were on NCAA probation, they were ineligible to win the conference.
Thus, the five teams that finished 4-3 in the league (Texas Tech, Texas, Baylor, TCU, and Rice) were all named conference co-champions. Because the Red Raiders had been the longest since going to the Cotton Bowl (an honor reserved for the SWC champion at that time), they were the school that got to play in that game on New Year’s Day in 1995.
To find the last time the Red Raiders actually won a conference championship outright, we have to go back to the 1950s. In 1955, the Red Raiders went 7-3-1 overall and 3-0-1 in the Border Conference to finish in first place. That was two seasons before the program joined the Southwest Conference.
Now, the program has gone all-in to try to end that unthinkable drought in 2025. To do so, though, the Red Raiders are trying to climb the mountain in a way no other Big 12 team has.
Texas Tech trying to be the fist Big 12 team to use the portal to as its primary means for building a title contender
Though players have always had the option to transfer to a new school, the era of the transfer portal has changed the game now that players don’t have to sit out a year after finding a new place to play. The portal was created in 2018, and in 2021, the NCAA stopped making transfers sit out a season.
Thus, there haven’t been a ton of years in which we’ve seen the transfer portal impact the college football landscape. Still, what the Red Raiders are attempting to do in 2025 is something no Big 12 school ever has. They are trying to use the transfer portal as the foundation of a conference championship team.
As most know, Tech’s current transfer class is ranked either first or second in the nation, depending on which website one references. 247Sports puts it at No. 2 behind LSU, while On3 ranks it No. 1. In fact, according to On3, Tech has the best transfer class in the history of the sport.
It is an experiment that no Big 12 team has undertaken. Can a program in this conference act like an SEC program and throw millions of dollars into the portal to build a title team?
In 2022, the first year that On3 ranked transfer classes, the top Big 12 class belonged to Texas. However, with only seven transfers that year, the Longhorns’ transfer class was ranked No. 8 nationally.
The next year, TCU had the top transfer class in the conference. However, they ranked just 20th nationally.
In 2024, Colorado actually ranked No. 2 in the nation with a transfer class that included 43 players, as head coach Deion Sanders continued his roster overhaul in his second season in Boulder. However, that was a different situation than the one Teas Tech is in this offseason.
Colorado was not trying to build an instant Big 12 title contender. Rather, it was simply trying to fill out its roster with warm bodies after dozens of players left following the 2023 season.
In fact, the average player rating of the Buffs’ transfer class last offseason was 74.19 (according to On3). By contrast, the 21 players that Tech has added this year via the portal have an average player rating of 82.19.
Tech has spent big to bring loads of high-profile players to the South Plains. This year, 13 of the transfers are rated 4-star players.
By contrast, in 2023, Colorado added only six 4-star transfers. Meanwhile, Sanders filled out his roster with 33 players rated as 3-star transfers.
In other words, no program in the history of the Big 12 has leveraged so much capital and hung so many of its title hopes on a group of transfers. We’ve seen programs such as Ole Miss in the SEC do what Tech is attempting to do by paying big-time money to load up its roster for a title run.
While the Rebels haven’t broken through in their conference, they have become nationally relevant. In fact, they were in the playoff conversation for the entirety of the 2024 season.
Tech would kill to be a playoff team given the program’s run of mediocrity since the end of the Mike Leach era. Of course, a conference title is the goal this season, as that would guarantee a playoff birth. It’s never been accomplished in the Big 12 by using the transfer portal, but that’s exactly what Tech is banking on this fall.
So far, the only programs to try to play the portal game to perfection have called the SEC home. But, in that conference, winning a league crown requires topping some of the heaviest hitters in the sport, so the transfer-heavy programs haven’t quite climbed the mountain. Now, it will be fascinating to find out if the nation’s top transfer haul can dominate a conference considered to be a notch below the elite leagues in the country.
