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Kliff Kingsbury is less than two weeks away from beginning his fourth season at the helm of the Texas Tech football program.

This fact has most likely not escaped the notice of Red Raider fans, as Kingsbury has been asked some variation of the same question multiple times this offseason: Do you feel like this is more your program now heading into Year 4?

The logic behind the question is obvious and easy to understand. Heading into a college football coach’s fourth season, the majority of his team’s roster will be made up of players that he recruited, offered and signed. That happens to be very true in this case. Texas Tech’s football roster is dominated by players that were brought to Lubbock by Kingsbury and his staff, and those same players will make up two-thirds or more of the program’s two-deep this season.

Yet, intentional or not, this question of program ownership is loaded with an underlying implication that coaches are not completely responsible, good or bad, for on-field results until their roster is full of players they recruited.

That’s nonsense.

The truth is that the Red Raider football program has been fully Kingsbury’s since Dec. 29, 2012 – the day after the Texas Tech’s win over Minnesota in the Texas Bowl. There is no ‘more’ of the program left to be had. It has been completely his from the jump. From the meteoric 7-0 start in 2013 to the 4-8 disaster in 2014 to last year’s record-setting offense – the good and the bad – Kingsbury owns all of it. Full stop.

Kingsbury knows this better than anyone. He witnessed that dynamic first-hand as a player. While he rose to national prominence under Mike Leach, Kingsbury was of course recruited to the South Plains by Spike Dykes and his staff. Yet Kingsbury’s highs and lows as the Red Raiders’ starting quarterback were always tied to Leach. And when he was named the Big 12’s Offensive Player of the Year and won the Sammy Baugh Trophy in 2002, those accolades were considered a testament to the program Leach had built, not an example of Dykes’ recruiting acumen.

When Texas Tech was getting dominated on the ground week after week in 2014 and 2015, Kingsbury didn’t rattle off all of the defensive misses – and, boy, there were a lot of them – in Tommy Tuberville’s 2012 recruiting class. He hasn’t thrown shade at Tuberville’s staff for its skill position misses in 2012 and 2013. He hasn’t cited Tuberville’s staffing failures as the root cause of the program’s defensive woes over the last several seasons.

Kingsbury, like Tuberville before him and Leach before that, accepted the situation that he inherited and went to work. Everything that has happened since that late December night in Houston and everything that will happen during the remainder of his tenure – the successes, failures, triumphs and misfires – are all on Kingsbury.