When you have the opportunity to play a weaker team, you better take advantage of it, and Texas Tech did just that last season against Baylor in Waco.
In fact, Baylor was the worst in 2023. That was evident when the Bears lost at home to Texas State by 11 points and backed it up with a 3-9 overall record and 2-7 in the Big 12 Conference by the end of the year.
Along the way, they lost their final five games, plus half of the games on their schedule by double digits.
But interestingly, when they faced the Red Raiders, they were fresh off one of the most unlikely wins for any team in the Big 12 in 2023. The week before, Baylor overcame a 35-7 third quarter deficit on the road to beat Central Florida, 36-35.
Maybe it caught the Red Raiders’ attention and gave Joey McGuire’s team reason to look up to the Bears, or maybe the game against UCF was just a coincidence, but whatever the reason, Texas Tech didn’t take Baylor off the mat in a 39-14 win in Waco that improved the Red Raiders to 3-3 on the year and 2-1 in Big 12 play.
So let’s take a look back at this dominant performance, which was perhaps Tech’s most complete game of 2023. First, let’s examine how the career-best performance paved the way for the Red Raiders.
Former Texas Tech edge rusher Steve Linton recorded just 7.5 sacks in five seasons as a college football player during his time at Syracuse and Texas Tech, with nearly half of that total coming in last year’s game against Baylor.
Facing a terrible Baylor offensive line that night, Linton looked like the dominant player Tech fans had heard he would be during the 2023 offseason. He recorded three sacks, including two that stole the ball from Baylor quarterback Blake Scheipen.
Last year, Baylor allowed 2.8 sacks per game, good for 106th in the nation, so the Red Raiders were expected to come out big, especially after blowing a double-digit lead in the first half.
Tech totaled six sacks of Schapen in the game, a season-high. Linton got half of them. For the rest of the season, Linton only played in two games and didn’t record any more sacks. But for at least one night, it looked like he was turning things around and becoming a mainstay on defense.
Another Red Raiser who, like Linton, had great athletic ability but struggled to reach his full potential in college, was Baylor Kupp, and like Linton, the former Texas Tech tight end had the best game of his career last season against the Bears.
Kupp played in 34 games between Texas A&M and Texas Tech, reaching the end zone just four times, with two of those scores coming against Baylor last season.
Kupp had just two catches for 34 yards, including a 17-yard touchdown. His first touchdown gave the Red Raiders a 14-0 lead in the second quarter and his second near the end of the third quarter gave them a 24-3 lead.
Tech got very little out of Kupp, a former top-tier high school recruit who spent his first two seasons at Texas A&M. Kupp’s best showing came last year against Texas, when he caught just four passes for 65 yards. But like Linton, Kupp only had one breakout game against Baylor in 2023.
Coming into this game, everyone was expecting a big performance from Taj Brooks, Tech was finally realizing he was their best offensive weapon, and Baylor’s run defense was absolutely awful.
Those expectations were fulfilled in spades, as Brooks ran for a career-high 170 yards and a touchdown on 31 rushing attempts (his 31 attempts was also a career-high at the time).
Brooks averaged 5.5 yards per rush for the game and approached 100 by halftime, and it was Brooks who prevented Baylor from mounting another comeback when they cut Tech’s lead to 24-11 early in the fourth quarter.
Brooks, who ran for 65 yards on nine touchdown drives and answered for Baylor’s only touchdown of the game, handled the ball four times for 39 yards, including a gutsy 18-yard touchdown run.
This was Brooks’ fourth consecutive 100-yard game, during which he gained 148 or more yards three times. On the season, Baylor ranked 115th nationally in run defense and allowed 184.9 rushing yards per game, second-most of any team in the Big 12, and the Red Raiders took full advantage of that weakness.
No episode would be complete without a look at Beren Morton’s revenge. The year before, he played his worst collegiate game in Lubbock against Baylor, a 45-17 blowout loss to the Bears on the night Patrick Mahomes II was inducted into the Texas Tech Football Ring of Honor.
In that game, the redshirt freshman quarterback, who had only made a handful of starts, was stumped by the Baylor defense, completing just 11 of 34 passes for 154 yards and one touchdown while being intercepted three times.
So it must have been important for Morton to play well against the Bears in 2023. Certainly, he accomplished that goal.
He threw for 180 yards and three touchdown passes, completing 19 of 26 attempts, and his lone interception appeared to be the result of a throwing shoulder injury (rather than poor judgment) as he missed a big throw to an open receiver who was a step or two ahead of the defense.
Morton’s three touchdowns were the most in a single game of his career, tying the same mark he set in the Independence Bowl against Cal State. Morton didn’t have to do much spectacularly in last season’s game against Baylor, where the ground game was dominant, but he found Coy Eakin’s back-shoulder fade pass for an early touchdown and then contested a pinpoint pass with Kupp for another, leading the Red Raiders to an early double-digit lead that they held for the rest of the game.
