Chris Level: Part of me wants to just copy-paste the "shoulder shrug" emoji and move on but that isn't how this works, especially when you have 10 games left play and all nine conference games.

This isn't what I expected to see and I know the head coach felt the same way. The penalties, the lack of execution in the run game, the poor tackling, the lack of a pass rush and the absence of forced turnovers were all present and accounted for and this team isn't good enough to overcome that stuff, especially all at once and on the road.

I'm not certain how much will improve on defense because David Gibbs essentially played everyone he had. Gibbs and his staff just need to keep grinding away at it with this young group.

On offense, the ground game must improve. It just has to. It will help your defense and Pat Mahomes. You have no chance to put together a winning record in the league without it. As bad as the defense was, I'm just as concerned about the run game.

We knew we'd learn a lot from this game in Tempe and we sure did. Most of it isn't good but nearly your entire season is still in front of you.

Aaron Dickens: Now we will see just how much different, if at all, this Texas Tech defense is from its immediate predecessors. Sure, the Red Raiders just gave up 68 points so they aren't that dissimilar from last year's group. But the 2015 defense allowed bad performances to bleed over into subsequent weeks -- 55 points to TCU and then 63 to Baylor the following Saturday, 63 points to Oklahoma and then 70 to Oklahoma State the next week. Will Texas Tech's defense allow the disaster in Tempe to snowball into a meltdown in Lubbock?

Will McKay: Well, we now reach our first fork in the road in this early season. This team has been dealt their first hand of adversity, one I don't think they necessarily expected. I think they fully expected to win the game against Arizona State, and I fully believe that Kliff Kingsbury, this staff, and the players on the team believe this is a better team than they showed in Tempe.

So, it becomes a question of where this team internally decides to go from here. Do they fold and roll over on defense and have a repeat of the 2015 season, one where they must find a way to outshoot every opponent they play? Or, does this defense decide to play fundamental, consistent football where they can at the very least get some necessary stops, which they are capable of as I've seen them do against SFA and early on against ASU.

This defense is more talented and experienced on the whole than it was a year ago. I do believe that. Mahomes and this offense can be as good or better than they were a year ago. I believe that, too.

What now? Decide which road you're gonna take, starting with La. Tech.

Matt Clare: Now what?

No, it is not time to quit the season and give up on yet another porous Red Raider defense.

Some of the players on this team might be young, but all of the coaches and all of the players are grown men. Regardless of age or experience, to a man, each member of the Texas Tech football team understands that type of performance is not going to get the job done in Big 12 play.

A majority of the issues on defense were again personnel related, however, the team has to make adjustments. If Coach Gibbs' goal on defense is to 'bend, but do not break', then his staff has a lot of work to do over the next few weeks. Mahomes will keep this team in games with his play at quarterback, but a strategy around scoring a lot of points and making a 'few' stops is not a sound strategy.

All that being said, the game against Arizona State was the first true road test and the Red Raiders clearly failed. There were some bright spots, but this team has to use this experience in order to improve over the next two weeks before traveling to Manhattan for the game against Kansas State.

Drew Kohnle: What’s next? I think what’s best at this point in time is to just wait. We didn’t wait after a game against Stephen F. Austin to proclaim the run defense was improved and that Tech was going to run the table this year. We didn’t wait after the performance against Arizona State before people were wanting the head coach and defensive coordinator gone and were predicting a losing season this year.

As fan bases, we tend to overreact and Tech has experienced two of the more dramatic overreactions I’ve witnessed in quite some time over the past two games. Is the defense really this bad? Quite possibly, yes. Is the run game going to be non-existent throughout the whole year? Maybe. There are a lot of unanswered questions, and that’s just how it is after two games in a season. Just wait.

If/when Tech performs well above expectations (or well below) against Louisiana Tech, then we can start firing people or proclaiming them as Big 12 champs. Obviously there is no in-between. For me, I think I’ll truly understand where this team is at after these next two games. So I’m just going to wait and see until then.