The Red Raiders are coming off a much-needed bye week where they’ll face the Horned Frogs of TCU on a Thursday night in Lubbock.
Texas Tech’s coordinators Tim DeRuyter and Zach Kittley felt this bye week was much needed for their respective units, looking forward to turning the page against the Horned Frogs on Thursday.
Both units underwent some construction over the bye week with DeRuyter’s defense seeing a major switch in the secondary and Kittley’s unit seeing a swap on the offensive line along with a fully healthy quarterback in Behren Morton.
DeRuyter explained his thought process on swapping STAR CJ Baskerville and boundary safety Tyler Owens eight games into the 2023 season, a somewhat surprising and intriguing move in the secondary.
“We're going to take a look at moving CJ to boundary safety, where he had played a little bit more at his previous school. We're trying to get our best guys in the best position to make plays,” DeRuyter said. “We think that moving Tyler closer to the line of scrimmage to take advantage of his speed off an edge and his ability to play on a slot receiver. We just think matchup wise and may give us some advantages.”
Kittley seemed bullish, as was the head coach Joey McGuire, over the swap for C Rusty Staats and RG Dennis Wilburn.
“The good thing about having him move back is that he did it all last year for us, and so that's huge for us,” Kittley said. “He's a good anchor, he's a really strong guy. Especially when you do play three-down team like TCU where you’re going to have a zero-nose on every single snap.”
The Horned Frogs are coming off an up-and-down two weeks where they blew the doors off of BYU in Fort Worth in freshman quarterback Josh Hoover’s first career start, but quickly came down to earth in a 41-3 blowout loss to Kansas State in Manhattan.
DeRuyter’s reshaped unit will be facing the true freshman in his third career start and second straight start on the road, looking to emulate what the Wildcats were able to do just over a week ago.
“I mean, that ball comes off his hand, it looks different. Good size guy, athletic. I don't know if they've been using him in the run game as much as they used Morris,” DeRuyter said about Hoover. “You’ve got to do a good job with you know, mixing coverages disguising coverages and hope that maybe you can confuse the quarterback a little bit by the looks that you give.”
On the other side of the ball, the TCU defense is running a similar scheme to what they were last season, something that Kittley believes could play in the Red Raiders favor, especially with Morton being healthy and having seen the defense last season.
“We felt like we had some really good stuff against last year and as part of the schematics of how offense works, we took some of the one-on-one shots instead of the progressions,” Kittley said. “Behren’s not even close to the same player that he was last year. I mean, he'd be the first to tell you that how much he's grown mentally, how much he sees the defense now. we're watching the game from last year and he’s calling himself an idiot based on his reads. So that's important for sure since he's played this defense last year.”
Tech and the Horned Frogs kick off on Thursday night at 6 p.m. from Jones AT&T Stadium.
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