Texas Tech's defense ranks near the bottom of the Big 12 and the nation in just about every traditional and analytical metric this season.

Despite Tech's defense being as healthy as it has been all year, it laid an egg against Baylor on Saturday, sending the Red Raiders back to the drawing board ahead of a trip down Highway-84 and Interstate-20 to Fort Worth this weekend.

For head coach Joey McGuire and defensive coordinator Tim DeRuyter, it starts with finding a pass rush, something that has been hurt by injuries, but has not been very good since Tyree Wilson left as a first round draft pick in 2022.

"None," McGuire said when asked about the pass rush on Saturday. "We didn't have one sack and did not have one time that we had a tackle for a loss. that's little bit of credit to them, but it's a lot of us. And you're never going to have a TFL when you're not setting the edge of the defense. You're never going to have a sack when everything's not married together. And, you know, we it's, it's like a broken record whenever it comes to that."

The Red Raiders' best day defensively came in Tucson, and a large portion of that success came from sending extra pressure at Arizona's quarterback Noah Fifita, something that Tech might have to resort to this weekend to throw turnover-prone TCU quarterback Josh Hoover for a loop.

"We got to continue to work on that, but we also got to continue to schematically, come up with some things to affect the quarterback," McGuire said. "If we allow this guy to stand back there, like most quarterbacks, but Hoover stands back there and he's going to pick us apart. He's got big arm. They've got three to four really, really good receivers, they're playing really well and and they're big and physical and so, I mean, that's something that we're really going to have to work on."

As Tech looks to continue to find that Tucson magic where Tech's defense was quick and played free, McGuire has talked with his players, who described their play from the weekend as "trying to be too perfect," something that McGuire and DeRuyter are looking to rectify this week.

"I said the perfection comes pre snap. Like, you got to get the call, you got to get aligned, and what's my assignment, and then you got to go be a football player," McGuire said. "I wanted to talk to them about and stuff like that, is like, why do you feel that way?...I think some of that stuff, of just overthinking stuff, is slowing us down."

For DeRuyter, this is already a vanilla scheme relative to what we have seen from his defensive units over the past two seasons, one that has been adjusted and trimmed down already this season, but it sounds as if Tech may be continuing to limit play calls to help the personnel play faster in coming weeks.

"We've got to do a much better job of number one affecting the quarterback. And we got to do that by pressuring him, giving him different looks, going back to playing fast," DeRuyter said. "As a play caller, we've got some new guys in so I'm trying to keep things a little bit more vanilla than what I'd like to do. We've got to press it, and we've got to do things to affect these receivers, and we have to do some things to affect the quarterback."