For more than 20 years, the Texas Tech football program was the model of stability. From 1987 through 2009, two men coached the Red Raiders. Under Spike Dykes and later Mike Leach, fans suffered through just three seasons where the side from Lubbock lost more games than it won. There were no conference championships or major postseason victories to celebrate, but the program was competitive against its conference peers and a perennial bowl team.

In the 12 years since Leach’s dismissal in 2009, the Red Raiders have had three different head coaches and are weeks away from having their fourth. That’s as many head coaches over the last decade as winning seasons.

People outside the Red Raider bubble have furrowed their brow at the university’s dismissal of Matt Wells after just 30 games. These drive-by experts have pointed to all kinds of things as reasons for giving Wells a fourth season - geography, the state of the program when he took over, the fact that his team is currently 5-3, you name it. Even Kliff Kingsbury's 7-0 record with the Arizona Cardinals has been thrown in Texas Tech fans' faces over the last 24 hours by people who were apparently in a coma during his mediocre tenure in Lubbock.

Nuts.

Texas Tech has its flaws, but a lack of self-awareness by the fans and administrations is not one of them.

The Red Raiders have not won or even played for an outright conference championship since Dwight Eisenhower occupied the White House. They have cracked double-digit wins just three times since joining the Southwest Conference in 1960 and have rarely finished ranked the season-end AP Top 25. The program has never played in one of the New Year’s Six bowls. Hell, the Red Raiders are 0-4 in the Cotton Bowl.

Texas Tech fans, unlike their counterparts in Lincoln, Neb. and Knoxville, Tenn., don't spend their time on message boards and Facebook longing wistfully for a return to championships and top-five finishes. That reality has never existed for the Red Raiders outside of dreams and well-worn copies of NCAA Football 2014.

The ask here is not a big one.

More often than not, win more than you lose. Texas Tech had just 15 losing seasons from 1960 through 2009, and four of those came immediately after it made the jump from the Border Conference to the Southwest Conference. Even Tommy Tuberville was able to produce two winning seasons before he slipped out of town and traded chicken fried steak for slop on spaghetti noodles.

Be competitive in conference play. The Red Raiders haven’t finished with a winning Big 12 record since 2009. They haven’t finished with more than three conference wins – in a league that plays nine conference games – since 2015. Barring a miracle finish under interim coach Sonny Cumbie, Texas Tech will finish this season 12 years removed from its last winning conference season and six removed from the last time it won more than three Big 12 games.

Since Texas Tech last season with a winning conference record, Baylor has won two Big 12 titles and played for another; TCU won a league title and played for another; Iowa State played for a conference crown and won a Fiesta Bowl a few weeks later; Oklahoma State won the Big 12 and has finished with double-digit wins six times; Kansas State won a Big 12 championship.

The Red Raiders will never match the tradition or resources of Texas or Oklahoma and, believe me, Texas Tech fans understand that. But there's no reason why those West Texas fans should expect anything less than what Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas State, Oklahoma State and TCU fans have enjoyed over the last decade.

But Wells gave Texas Tech fans little reason to think over the last three years that progress toward that goal was being made. The offense regressed noticeably in Year 2 under David Yost as did the Red Raiders’ special teams units. Wells, according to sources, initially balked when the administration approached him in 2020 about changing his staff to address some of those problem areas. The blowout, non-competitive losses to Texas and TCU this season - to say nothing of the near-miss in September against FCS Stephen F. Austin - may have been viewed differently had they happened in the first year of Wells' rebuild, not Year 3. The team's inability to put away a decidedly average Kansas State team in the first half last Saturday and register the first back-to-back Big 12 wins of Wells' tenure was, in many ways, a perfect encapsulation of Texas Tech football over the last 30 games: good things were done, but not enough for them to matter in the end.

Wells leaves the Texas Tech football program largely as he found it. It was on a run of losing seasons when he arrived two Decembers ago and now that ignominious streak is up to six years, the Red Raiders' longest such stretch since the Jerry Moore days of the 1980s.

Texas Tech moved on from Moore at the end of that last streak, like it moved on from Wells yesterday. Maybe that decision was also met with raised eyebrows at the time but it worked out OK in the end. Moore's dismissal, with an assist from David McWilliams and the Texas Longhorns, eventually led to Dykes taking over the program at the end of the 1986 season. More than 20 years of competitiveness and conference relevance followed.

It may not be Nebraska’s heyday or the stuff of dreams and video games, but Red Raider fans would surely be just fine with that history repeating itself.