The uncertain tone and vagueness to the questions being thrown at Texas Tech head coach Tommy Tuberville and Minnesota head coach Jerry Kill and the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas press conference Wednesday in Houston told you the local media doesn't quite know what its dealing with yet.

That was to be expected. Right in their backyard is Texas A&M which had a good season and quarterback Johnny Manziel is in the running for the Heisman Trophy. Then there's chief rival -- if only in theory -- Texas a fairly short car ride away plus Houston and Rice and the red hot Houston Texans of the NFL.

Tech finished the 2012 regular season as an average top tier football team more than 500 miles removed from Houston so if you wanted consistent Red Raider news in Houston you had to look for it on Fox Sports Southwest, news organizations to the north and school specific websites. The university just doesn't get as much exposure in Houston as it does in North and West Texas.

It's always been a tougher challenge to recruit students, or student-athletes, from Houston compared to West Texas and the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

The university has made a lot of headway in the past decade both on the gridiron and in the classrooms but when it comes to an in-state metropolis of 5,626,000 that's more than 500 miles away Tech could always use more. So here it is in the form of the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas.

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