The oldest grudge in football

• Dave WilsonNov 12, 2026, 08:00 AM ET

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  Dave Wilson is a college football reporter. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun.

I. Prologue

There's an old saying in the oil business: The best place to find oil is where the oil is.

For a long time, it seemed like a well in West Texas known as the Santa Rita No. 1 was not where the oil was.

It was more than 100 miles from anything else, on land that had been deemed a "petroleum graveyard." For more than two years, drillers pounded away at the hardscape, amid sandstorms and sweltering heat, managing barely four-and-a-half feet of progress a day. They worked 12-hour shifts to pulverize layers of caliche, continued through red clay, then caprock made of gypsum and rock salt. Their only company was roadrunners, rattlesnakes and the rhythm of the rig.

The Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado had once described the region's plains in 1541, writing "there was not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by." The land was arid, rocky and so bereft of value that the State of Texas set it aside as an endowment for public education known as the Permanent University Fund, or PUF, with hopes that any proceeds from cattle grazing or dry farming would someday supplement a public university with spare change. The plot grew to 2.1 million acres across 24 counties after the Texas and Pacific Railroad, granted a million acres by the state, handed its share back, believing it was useless.

But on May 28, 1923, after 646 days of drilling, the Santa Rita No. 1 hit. The ground hissed and wind started blowing from 3,000 feet below. It blew louder. The Earth rattled. Suddenly oil exploded through the frame of the Santa Rita, named for the Patroness of the Impossible, and blew out the top of the rig. Workers were so woefully unprepared for the miraculous strike that oil ran over the ground for a month until tanks could arrive to hold it.

Two West Texas businessmen, Frank T. Pickrell and Haymon Krupp, had discovered the immense commercial potential of the Permian Basin oilfield, one of the great finds in American history. The field would one day supply the crude that powered the Allies to victory in World War II and make the United States the world's largest oil producer.

Thanks to the arrangement outlined in the PUF -- the current market value of which is roughly $43 billion -- West Texas crude would also make the University of Texas and Texas A&M two of the richest universities in the country. For rival Texas Tech University in Lubbock, chartered 107 days before the discovery, it would provide nothing. Not a cent.

II. The rainmaker

The vast expanse of West Texas has long attracted colorful characters with audacious schemes. Entire towns sprang forth and died, like Emma, about 25 miles east of Lubbock, which lost the county seat when the railroad missed it by 5 miles. The town's buildings were moved to Crosbyton by four engines, 30 men and 22 mules. In 1906, cereal magnate C.W. Post used his Grape-Nuts and Post Toasties fortune to attempt to build a utopian society 40 miles from Lubbock, and, to keep it fed, tried to make it rain. After hearing stories of showers that followed cannon fire in the Civil War, Post flew dynamite on kites into the sky. The rain didn't come. By 1914, he was gone. The town of Post, TX, population 4,790, remains.

There's been no bigger boom-or-bust region in American history than West Texas. Fortunes in the Permian Basin get made, lost and made again. In the 1980s, oil prices bottomed out at $19 a barrel. The state's largest independent bank, worth $1.2 billion, failed in Midland, and the once-thriving Rolls-Royce dealership there went under.

These days, the part of the rainmaker is played by oil and gas exploration and production man Cody Campbell, co-founder and co-CEO of Double Eagle Energy Holdings. He's a Red Raider looking to get Texas Tech its long-overdue due, beginning with building its football program into a powerhouse to rival the teams at UT and A&M and anyone else in the country. Campbell is a new-money man -- he started buying up oil and gas rights after a career in real estate dried up with the crash in 2008 and is sitting on a fortune now -- with no interest in old manners. He talks openly about paying players, and he has gone to Washington to try to influence how college sports are governed, using his political connections and deep pockets to disseminate his opinions on how they should be reformed. For more than a year, he's beamed his face into our living rooms in self-made commercials pitching his own plan to save college sports from financial ruin.

A fourth-generation Red Raider and former Tech offensive lineman who played at 6-foot-4, 305, Campbell still looks the part, albeit leaner. He operates like a mix of Jerry Jones and Lane Kiffin, part salesman and part circus ringleader, embracing the attention economy. Campbell is very rich and very Texan and chairs the Texas Tech System Board of Regents. He wants Tech feared, envied, respected or loathed. Any one of them will do.

In person, Campbell is soft-spoken, a National Merit Scholar in high school who says he eschewed Ivy League and Stanford offers to play in Lubbock. In a conference room in a modest office park in Fort Worth, the decor does the bragging. A cabinet along the back wall is lined with corporate trophies, mementos marking the close of business deals like when Double Eagle III sold for $6.4 billion in 2021 (one of four times Double Eagle startups have sold, totaling about $13 billion). A glass case in the corner is filled with autographed football helmets, including one from his former coach Mike Leach and another from a Red Raiders teammate, Kliff Kingsbury. There are three oil field hard hats, along with a golden hand signaling the "Guns Up" gesture.

Ask him about NIL's impact on the college game and he gushes with the zeal of an early adopter. "We were the first ones to actually come to the realization that this is just our reality. We're going to be living in and playing by these rules -- or no rules -- as the case actually was," he said. Campbell believes that opportunity comes from chaos. "We were unexpected. We've been disruptive."

So Campbell helped build a better war chest, paid in, and it paid off. Last season, Texas Tech went 12-1 in the regular season, won its first outright conference title since 1955, made it to the College Football Playoff, and had a record nine players taken in the NFL draft, matching the number it had in the previous five seasons combined.

Double Eagle, the company Campbell co-founded with longtime friend John Sellers, is named after their high school mascot, the Canyon High School Eagles. Campbell and Sellers grew up just south of Amarillo in the Texas panhandle. They became best friends at 12, played high school football together, and played for Texas Tech under Mike Leach from 2000 to 2004. Their final year, Tech finished 8-4 and ranked No. 18 in the AP poll, its highest final ranking since 1976. After college, Campbell and Sellers became landmen and negotiated deals for mineral rights. They put everything they had on a lease in the Haynesville shale field in East Texas, flipped it to another operator who was looking to drill, and made some walking-around money. From then on, they were hooked on dealmaking and set their sights back home on the Permian.

On July 1, 2021, name, image and likeness deals became legal for college athletes. Twenty days later, the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas and Oklahoma intended to leave for the SEC, and the Big 12 was suddenly teetering. If history had taught the Red Raiders anything, nobody was going to look out for them but themselves. And Campbell, one of theirs, was there. Texas Tech made it clear it was open for business, and the Pac-12 made sense, connecting the West Coast to West Texas. But then-Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff publicly cited academics and "cultural fit," and said there would be a "high bar for entry" for any new member. The distance from Berkeley, California, to Lubbock, Texas, was more than just mileage.

Texas Tech was on the precipice of losing its foothold in a power conference.

"It was important to make our move now," Campbell said.

Campbell helped found the Matador Club, the Texas Tech NIL collective which grew to more than 3,500 members; by his own count, 90% of the people he asked for money said yes.

Along the way, he became as much Tech's national mascot as Raider Red. Unlike the old back-room boosters, Campbell answered questions on the record and on social media, making national headlines with public spats with everyone from SEC commissioner Greg Sankey to his own Big 12 commissioner, Brett Yormark, to random fans and local radio producers. This all has made some Red Raiders uncomfortable with the amount of attention he has drawn. But as one athletic director put it, "we all wish we had a Cody."

Before the 2025 season, the Red Raiders became one of the most aggressive teams in the transfer portal, landing 26 transfers in ESPN's second-ranked transfer class, with the Double T logo showing up on commitment lists alongside teams like Oregon, LSU and Miami. Tall cotton.

"We landed everybody that came on campus that we wanted. It was just pretty amazing to watch," Campbell said. He credits rah-rah coach Joey McGuire as much as the money.

"It's about the money," Campbell said. "But they're still kids, and the old-school recruiting part of it is still a real thing for most of them."

Tech's magical season last year ended with a thud: a 23-0 loss to Oregon in the CFP quarterfinal at the Orange Bowl, but also with a sense of what it felt like to belong.

So they swung big again, landing their biggest target in this year's portal, determined to supercharge an offense that fell short. When Brendan Sorsby, their $5 million quarterback signee, was declared ineligible for what the NCAA said was more than 9,000 impermissible wagers, including more than 40 involving Indiana football when he played there in 2022, Campbell and McGuire pledged to support him as he went into treatment for a gambling addiction and sought an injunction from the NCAA's ruling.

On June 8, retired Fort Worth judge Ken Curry shocked the NCAA when he granted Sorsby a temporary injunction to play for Tech. Campbell and the Red Raiders were ready to accept Curry's two-game suspension and then play Sorsby, which led to national scorn and threats of boycotts by other teams. Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said the ruling "could have broad impacts across college athletics, creating great concern amongst our membership." Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor called the injunction "f---ing bulls---." Florida AD Scott Stricklin compared it to the 1919 Black Sox Scandal.

"For whatever reason, the world melted down like college football was ruined forever," Ron Slavin, Sorsby's agent, told ESPN in August.

Campbell went on the offensive, particularly upset that Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks had told his teams not to schedule Texas Tech.

On X, he posted a link to the story about Brooks' memo, and asked the Grok AI assistant, "how many @GeorgiaFootball players have been arrested in the last year?" The answer was eight.

It wasn't until the Big 12 filed a federal lawsuit that the Red Raiders decided they needed to stand down. Texas Tech was painted as a win-at-all-cost program. Campbell defended his combative responses. "You corner somebody and they're going to fight back," he said. "Especially if they're a West Texan." The most reasonable Red Raider in your life will tell you the same thing. Bruce McFarling, a judge in the 362nd District Court in Denton, one of the Texas Tech fans who found a Colorado playbook earlier this year on a trip to Boulder, said the way the world reacted to the Sorsby situation was evidence that the Red Raiders are outsiders.

"They're looking for a way to put us down," McFarling said. "The Big Ten was saying, 'Well, we're not going to schedule Tech or play them anymore.' If that had been Notre Dame, would Ohio State be saying, we're never going to play Notre Dame again? Or had it been Alabama, would they have done that? I think the answer would've been no."

III. Pursuance

A year after the Santa Rita came in, Preston Smith and his family, including 12 siblings, loaded up and headed west from the Austin area to Lamesa, about 60 miles south of Lubbock. There, he spent his high school years "working in the sand" on his family's 320 acres. The Smiths were tenant farmers, renting and working the land and praying the crops would provide.

When Preston graduated from high school in 1930, he boarded a bus with $50 in life savings and headed for Lubbock to change his fortunes by enrolling in the fledgling Texas Technological College, which had graduated its first class of 26 students, including Cody Campbell's great-grandfather, just three years earlier.

Soon, he built a small chain of Lubbock movie theaters, including the Tech Theater, the Plains and the Red Raider Drive-In. They made him a popular man. In 1944 he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives, where he immediately went on the offensive for Tech. Smith vigorously argued that Tech deserved its own cut of the Permanent University Fund's West Texas riches, proposing a constitutional amendment that would dissolve the fund and distribute the money to all the state's universities.

There was precedent for such a change. Texas A&M, originally chartered as part of the University of Texas system, had always claimed it was entitled to a share of the money. And when the PUF turned valuable in 1923, A&M renewed its fight and vowed to take it all the way to the Texas Supreme Court. Eventually, UT regents relented. After seven years of battling, the Aggies got the one-third share that they still have today.

Rep. Rae Files Still, a Texas grad, killed Preston Smith's bill with a motion to send the resolution out of committee. Taking money away from Texas, she said, would destroy UT's ambitions to become one of America's elite universities, whereas Tech had no such chance. Smith said that was nonsense. He thought the Longhorns were scared.

"They don't like the competition Tech is giving them," he said in 1947. "And they're determined to do something about it if they can."

Smith went on to serve as lieutenant governor and became the first West Texan to become governor, but the PUF stayed untouched and Texas made sure everyone knew it was never changing. In 1974, when Texas was considering a new state constitution, UT's Frank Erwin, the most powerful of all of Texas' regents, went on the offensive, saying "any dilution of UT's money would be catastrophic."

An amendment to include Tech in the PUF distribution lost 118-62 that year, with newspapers reporting that many voting delegates wore orange ties, blazers or shirts. The Associated Press wrote that the "sacred cow was once again locked in the orange, white and maroon barn."

IV. Inheritance

In Lubbock, there's no respite from the sun, with trees in short supply. There's about 18 inches of precipitation a year, it's windy, and a lot of that wind carries dust. In winter, blue northers, fast-moving cold fronts, can drop the temperature 20 degrees or more in minutes. In summer, haboobs, or massive dust storms that appear to be walls of debris thousands of feet high, can turn day into night, quickly blinding drivers. Students get to class with dirt in their teeth.

A trip to Dallas, Austin or Norman will cost you at least five hours each way, road trips so flat and straight and wide open that Spike Dykes, the legendary character and one of Tech's most beloved coaches, would wedge a cut-off golf club between the gas pedal and his seat like a homemade cruise control, do crossword puzzles on his knee and pass slowpokes on the right shoulder while making the drive to his lake house in Horseshoe Bay near Austin.

Come to Tech, and you've made a choice about where you want to be. Students love that nobody leaves for the weekend, because it's too far to go anywhere before you have to turn around and come back. West Texans know they don't live in the garden spot of America, but they love what they have.

They love what it takes to be one of them. Nobody outside of Lubbock thought Buddy Holly's horn-rimmed glasses were cool until John Lennon did. "If it wasn't any good here," said Dave Hudson, a Red Raiders alum, "Rock and roll would've never been invented." Terry Allen, Mac Davis, Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore all became influential musicians who made songs appear out of West Texas dust. The locals have come to embrace the outside of it all. But that doesn't mean they've lost their edge.

Preston Schmid, the 2023 homecoming king and current Tech law school student, said he proselytizes about the indignity of the PUF at bars. After he becomes a lawyer, he hopes to get involved in politics. It's in his blood; he's Preston Smith's great-grandson.

"We're in a position where we have to fight and scrap for everything that we have," Schmid said. "A majority of these people in the Texas government have affinity for either A&M or UT. So if we're going to do something, we kind of have to grit our teeth and do it our own way. We're approaching this to win. We're not approaching this to be popular."

Schmid is a Lubbock native. He calls the landscape a "settler's environment." The exact borders of what could be considered Texas Tech's turf is debatable, but if you combine the West Texas and High Plains regions as defined by the Texas comptroller's office, then add a few bordering counties, it looks about right. Think Amarillo down past Midland-Odessa toward Big Bend, from the New Mexico border to just short of Abilene.

It's a massive area that stretches over 85,000 square miles, larger than Utah and 37 other states, covering 32% of Texas' land mass, but holding just 5% of its population, an average of 18 residents per square mile. It's the only major population center in a Texas region devoted to a single university. And Lubbock, population 273,000, is the "Hub City," with four major highways and I-27 intersecting it, the only major population center in a Texas region devoted to a single university. It's more than 300 miles to Dallas, El Paso, Waco or Austin.

Taylor Sheridan, the creator of "Landman" and "Yellowstone," wrote one of his first screenplays, "Hell or High Water," about beleaguered West Texans who robbed banks to tip the scales of what they saw as economic injustice. He's drawn to the hard-scrabble locals, and now, along with a group of other investors, owns the legendary 156-year-old Four Sixes ranch about an hour and a half east of Lubbock.

Driving Highway 82 from Fort Worth, you have to plan ahead, he said. From Seymour to Benjamin, there's an hour between gas stations. Then there's another stretch like that afterward.

"There's not many places like that left in the country," Sheridan said. "It's like that in any direction."

Kids that grow up in these communities dream of going to Tech. The university has more than 46,000 students now, not all of whom come from small towns, but once they arrive, they are all influenced by the West Texas environment and the people who live there.

"It's the geography and just how tough it is to live there," Sheridan said. "Whether that's working in pipeline service or you're midstream or you're a landman or a speculator, you're gambling in some way. If you've ever been on a rig, you're gambling with your life or at least with your fingers. These are tough ways to make a living that breed really tough people. And you have to be firmly resolute in what you're trying to achieve, because pretty much everyone's going to tell you it's not achievable."

Schmid says the weather is as tough as the people. The rolling dust storms can black out the entire sky in a moment's notice.

"If you're stuck outside, you're screwed," Schmid said. "Because our environment is one that's uncomfortable, it makes for people that I think are able to withstand some things that other people wouldn't be able to."

Outsiders' jokes at their expense bind them closer together in a type of fraternity. They're allowed to talk about it; you're not. Lubbock regularly shows up on "worst college towns" lists. But students don't care.

"It's like living on an island; an island of dirt," Schmid said. "It's very much different than any other place and you kind of grow to love that. The isolation makes it to some seem undesirable, but to a lot of us it's what makes it incredibly desirable. You're someone here, where other places you might not be that important."

But even the important people find themselves as the butt of jokes from the most unexpected places. Tech caught a stray in May when legendary New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, during a commencement address at Georgetown's business school, shouted out his former teammate Danny Amendola, a Red Raider. Brady paid tribute to the undersized (5-11) wide receiver who overachieved by going undrafted and playing 13 NFL seasons and earning two Super Bowl rings, saying he was a dependable target in the biggest situations.

"Having business school friends [is] great, don't get me wrong," said Brady, a Michigan Man. "But sometimes you need a kid from a glorified community college who can bail your ass out of any jam."

In 1984, Sports Illustrated's Douglas S. Looney wrote that the Texas Tech campus was the ugliest in America, saying it should cancel classes and convert the school into a prison. Still getting hate mail after three years, Looney opted to rub a little more salt into the wound. "An avalanche of mail disputed this assertion," Looney wrote in 1987. "So we have looked at the school again, rechecked the photos and consulted experts. We are not too proud to admit our mistakes. This, however, was not one of them."

That's not to say there's no beauty in Lubbock. The campus is celebrated architecturally, designed in a Spanish Renaissance style, a tribute to Spain and Coronado's influence on West Texas. Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Michener, who wrote the 1,000-page novel "Texas," described the Tech campus as "the most beautiful west of the Mississippi, until you get to Stanford."

But for years, Tech coaches strategized on routes to bring players to campus to minimize exposure. Leach used to tell me that he liked to recruit East Texas around my hometown of Kilgore because it was so awful that while it wasn't easy to get players to Lubbock, kids from there would never get homesick.

Mack Brown recalled his first visit to the area after being hired as the head coach of UT in Austin. He was flying to Lubbock to speak at an alumni event, and as the plane was descending, a friend who accompanied him and was visiting for the first time looked out the window and remarked how ugly Lubbock was. The pilot, a Texas Tech grad, overheard him.

"The beauty," he said, "is below the ground."

V. The biosphere of spite

Dave Hudson and Garry Berry grew up in College Station, of all places, and headed off for Texas Tech many years ago. They've been best friends since 1959, a fact that's sewn onto the label of a Goin' Band from Raiderland uniform Berry is wearing, a custom-made gift from Hudson. Berry has three daughters who are recent graduates of Texas Tech, and he is proud to have raised Gen Z Red Raiders who don't have to suffer on Saturdays.

Before the Oct. 31 game against Arizona, they pulled up to the bar at the Frazier Alumni Pavilion outside the stadium, zipping along on Lime scooters with an Aggie buddy in tow and Berry's cape on his band jacket flapping along behind him.

The Red Raiders were back home after a 37-24 loss to Cincinnati, and Berry rode by the radio station's live broadcast, where a listener was asking the hosts in a live chat what this year's offense had shown them to give them confidence that they could return to the College Football Playoff. To Berry and Hudson, for the longest time football games in Lubbock were just about having a little fun. The idea of being disappointed at 6-1 is a new luxury. They looked around at the scene, a new $242 million football facility behind them, and thought about how much things had changed.

"We were kind of the stepchild in Texas," Berry said. "It's hard competing against legislation."

"We went and found our own PUF fund," Hudson said, before the old pals wandered over to the bar in a nearby tent to keep the party going.

You don't hear much public lamentation that these have become Cody Campbell's Red Raiders, who play on Cody Campbell Field underneath a shiny Double Eagle logo on the facade of their new end zone complex, which includes Cody Campbell's suite. Schmid calls Campbell a dream booster.

"I see a man that I hope to become one day," he said.

Game day in Lubbock is a full-on spectacle now. The Masked Rider, Sofie Jones, a third-generation Red Raider and member of the Texas Tech Rodeo Team, charges onto the field atop her horse, Matador, amid flames, fireworks and a stadium awash in red and black. A drone show spells out "THE BAD GUYS" in the sky over the new Double-T scoreboard, a reproduction of an old beloved classic, one of the stadium upgrades paid for by a $25 million donation by Campbell.

This is the new world, and Texas Tech is at the forefront. Boosters are on national television talking about portal deals and taking on the haters.

These things are fluid, but if you wanted to pinpoint the beginning of modern Tech history, you could do worse than Nov. 9, 2024. After a 41-27 loss to Colorado, Cody Campbell took to X to complain about the officiating. A Tech fan shot back: "Don't be a pink raider, b----. Buy us an oline."

Eight minutes later, Campbell replied.

"I will."

This is the Campbell the country has grown to know, the fixer who's also their fighter. He says he was hardened by where he's from and inspired by playing for a coach, Leach, who wouldn't accept any excuses, and fought against the conventions of traditional college football, confident in his own approach, with his own swagger and embrace of the West Texas hostility.

"Playing for Coach Leach, especially at that time when they didn't have a lot of limitations on practice time, that toughness was continually ingrained in me," Campbell said. "He really would play it up and say, 'If you come to Lubbock, you better be careful, you better look out. You may not make it out of here alive.'"

Neither Leach nor Campbell ever met a microphone they didn't love. Leach could opine on dating tips, candy corn or mascot fights, then rip his players and say they're paying too much attention to their "fat little girlfriends." Campbell can lead a university board meeting, negotiate a mineral rights deal and then get on social media and argue with @CycloneLarry69 in front of the whole world. He once invited a guy named Longhorn Diesel to line up for Oklahoma drills in his backyard, adding "All I need is a Miller Lite and a jock strap."

So when Steve Sarkisian was litigating Texas' College Football Playoff exclusion this offseason at the Touchdown Club of Houston, he took a shot at Tech's schedule and Campbell returned to reply-guy mode.

"There's a team in our state in another conference with a schedule that I would argue if I played with our twos and threes, we could go undefeated," Sarkisian said. "And they'll probably make the CFP this year."

Suddenly, there was Campbell, on "The Pat McAfee Show," challenging Texas to spot the ball and put the Red Raiders back on their schedule. He and head coach Joey McGuire both said they'd be happy to buy out any of Texas' opponents for the opportunity.

"Bevo, the Longhorns mascot, is a steer, and it's become very clear that there are quite a few steers down in Austin and not very many bulls," Campbell said. "Let me tell you something: When Sark opened his mouth and picked a fight with a bunch of West Texas boys, he should have known that he better get ready to pack a lunch."

Leach had good teams here -- they were ranked No. 2 for a hot minute in 2008 -- but that was a long time ago. The goal now is to matter, year in and year out. They're ready to strike. To be on the radar. To not be on the outside looking in.

"I like to be provocative," Campbell said. He knows that it's easy for a politician or commissioner to placate him on phones behind the scenes. Where he's from, they've learned to take the fight public. "I try to say things that are going to elicit a response of some kind."

The social media behavior is not always popular with his wife Tara or with his business partner, Sellers.

"He and I've had some debates on how out there he needs to be," Sellers told ESPN's Dan Murphy last year, particularly giving Campbell the business about his television commercials lobbying to save college sports. "Like, what the hell are you doing here, man?"

Campbell certainly believes he's right about the idea that Texas Tech has every right to take as big a swing as the Aggies or the Longhorns. They both still outspend the Red Raiders, he says, but nobody has a problem with that. When Texas Tech buys players, it's held up as all that's wrong with college football, because the program is not supposed to be in that rarified air. According to The Athletic's survey of personnel figures, Texas is among the top three spenders in college football with an estimated $45-55 million roster. Texas A&M was right behind them at $45-$50 million, while Texas Tech was in the $38-$42 million range.

At Big 12 media days before the 2025 season, The Athletic spoke to a dozen coaches, who were granted anonymity to give their opinions on the Red Raiders.

"It's childish. It's, 'Hey, look at me,'" one said. "I don't think it's good for college football." Another called their spending "asinine," and a colleague said Texas Tech wasn't just outbidding rivals, it was tripling what other teams were offering.

"We were extremely honest with what we were doing and we were doing what everybody else was doing," McGuire said. "We talked about it, and everybody else didn't want to talk about it. I do think there's some publicity that is bad publicity, but if they're talking about you, then that's a good thing."

VI. Crude

This idea of new-money boorishness has been in West Texas consciousness since "Giant" held a magnifying glass up to it in the 1950s. The 1956 movie, based on Edna Ferber's novel, is about an iconoclastic Texas ranching dynasty and the upstart oilman who upends it, transforming the power structures in the state.

James Dean plays Jett Rink, a ranch hand who is bequeathed a piece of land by the sister of a rancher played by Rock Hudson. Rink strikes oil on that little patch, stretching his arms wide and looking toward the sky as he's showered in oil. He hops in his rickety truck and drives back to the mansion where Hudson's character, Bick Benedict, his fellow cattle barons, and their wives, all sit, some with their noses literally upturned.

As Rink emerges from his truck, delirious and disgusting, Benedict, in a crisp white shirt and a burnt orange knit tie, asks him what he wants.

"My well came in big, so big, Bick. I'm rich, Bick," he says, his voice rising. "Me, I'm gonna have more money than you ever thought you could have."

He leers at Bick's wife. Gets really close and says she looks good enough to eat. Bick punches him in the face, but Rink gets up, pays him back threefold, a red bandana hanging from his blackened trousers, and then drives away.

"You should have shot that fella a long time ago," one of the fellow cattle barons says to Benedict. "Now he's too rich to kill."

VII. The long wait

Lugene Pickering hopes you can understand. These Red Raiders have dreamt of days like this. They aren't bad people. They've just had it up to here.

Pickering speaks in a syrupy lilt and might as well be the Lubbock Welcoming Committee chair. She was born in Lubbock on 37th Street, was Tech's 1975 homecoming queen, a twirler and a member of the band. As she presses pie dough into an oversized skillet in her kitchen, she describes how she befriends every new coach and their staff and definitely all of their wives. "I tell them I love them, but I'm almost afraid to get too attached," she said. So many have come and gone in her time here, and she knows how tough this business is on families.

She and her husband, David, are boosters too -- "we're water people, not oil people" -- and she's dreamt of days like these, of packed stadiums and big games. When the Red Raiders made the playoff and went to the Orange Bowl last year, Lugene drove to McGuire's house and dumped a crate of oranges on his front porch to celebrate.

She went to high school with Campbell's dad in nearby Haskell, and says that Cody means well. He's just got a lot of Red Raider blood in him. If you knew the long road they took to get here, she believes, you'd feel the way Campbell and the rest of them do.

"We've been hungry for so long," she said. "I can remember in junior high and high school, my dad, every year would say, 'Next year we've got it.' And it never happened."

These sentiments are generational, part of the epigenetics of a Red Raider. They had to scrap to even get the place built. In 1921, the day that Texas Gov. Pat M. Neff vetoed a bill creating a new public university in West Texas, 5,000 angry locals gathered in Sweetwater to demand action. They invoked "taxation without representation" and threatened secession.

"For the next three years West Texans assumed a militant attitude both in and out of the legislature," historian Ernest Wallace wrote. In what Wallace called "a token appeasement," the Texas Technological College was chartered. Football dreams quickly followed.

Tech started playing football in 1925 but languished in the small-time Border Conference until the early 1950s. The Red Raiders kept football dates open hoping to play the bigger schools but were dismissed again and again. They were too far out in the hinterlands and too lightweight academically.

So the Red Raiders launched an ingenious attack of sorts on Dallas, putting the pressure on Neiman Marcus president and CEO Stanley Marcus, the city's most prominent tastemaker, to intervene on their behalf. When SMU routinely proved to be one of the votes blocking Texas Tech's acceptance, Red Raiders fans mailed their store credit cards back to the company's headquarters, vowing not to spend their new oil riches in Dallas again. Not until Mr. Marcus could talk some sense into those uppity folks over on the Hilltop.

In 1952, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal implored fans to continue, saying the campaign was working, and printed a response from the company president's office:

"The decision of the Southwest Conference not to admit Texas Tech was something over which we had no control whatsoever. No one in the Neiman-Marcus organization had any influence whatsoever in that decision, any more than any of us here could decide who was going to be the Republican nominee for the Presidency."

SMU relented in 1956 and the rest of the SWC followed in a unanimous vote. Lubbock threw a raucous celebration. The Avalanche-Journal reported the news "crackled over the campus, Lubbock and the plains of West Texas like a jet fighter breaking the sound barrier." It was hailed as the biggest day in the history of the university and the moment that made Lubbock "the great sports center of West Texas."

But being in the club only got them so far. Over the next three decades, Tech finished in the AP top 25 exactly twice. Then Spike Dykes, a folksy Texan from down the road in Ballinger arrived in 1984 and did it twice in his first nine years as head coach, becoming a legend for doing more with less and winning games the Red Raiders cared most about. Tech had beaten the dreaded Longhorns just twice in the previous decade. Dykes did it six times in 13 years.

By the early 1990s, the SWC began to crumble, and the Red Raiders were told by their counterparts in Austin and College Station that they weren't a priority, according to the late Jim Brunjes, the university's former Chief Financial Officer. "Wherever you want to go, that's fine, we don't care, but you're not going to go into a major conference," Tech was told, Brunjes said in a 2018 interview. But Texas Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, a Tech alum and protege of Preston Smith's, used the PUF as a hammer, telling A&M and Texas that the rest of their appropriations could be slashed if they didn't take Tech with them. In 1996, the three schools, along with Baylor (then-Gov. Ann Richards' alma mater) merged with the Big Eight to form the Big 12, and Tech clung to power-conference status. "We're really in the Big 12 because of one man," Brunjes said.

When Leach showed up in 2000 with the Air Raid, a no-nonsense approach to coaching and a totally nonsense approach to press conferences it made Texas Tech cool, or at least fun. He went 7-3 against the Aggies, and beat Texas just twice, but one was the greatest game in school history: 2008, when Michael Crabtree scored with one second left to beat the No. 1 Longhorns 39-33.

Joey McGuire credits Leach with energizing the West Texas mentality for a new generation of rebellious fans in Lubbock.

"The majority of Red Raiders, the one thing they do identify with is the Pirate, Mike Leach," he said. "In your face is the way we do things."

VIII. Turning the corner

Texas Tech linebacker John Curry is a Lubbock native and the son of two former Red Raiders athletes. He never considered going anywhere else for college, and he signed as one of the least heralded members of the 2023 signing class after McGuire's first season, when the Red Raiders finished 8-5.

"When we were the underdog, people were like, 'Oh my gosh, good for Tech. They succeeded finally,'" he said. Now, with the Raiders backing up a CFP appearance with eight wins and counting, that is decidedly not the case.

Growing up, suffering was part of the deal. "When I was a kid, my parents were like, 'We are Tech fans. You live in Lubbock, you're a Tech fan, and there's no switching up even through the trials and tribulations,'" he said. "And there are going to be a lot of those."

For a while, they only had upsets to celebrate. In 2001, when Tech beat A&M in Lubbock, fans stormed the field, tore down the goalposts and jammed them into the Aggies' section in the end zone stands, causing fights to break out.

Then-president David Schmidly vowed that Texas Tech would not "be known as a place that a bunch of ruffians can ruin an athletic event because they can't control their emotions or their tempers."

Lugene Pickering wasn't having it. "I know it was such a redneck thing to do," she said, "but it was great."

Leach led the Red Raiders to a bowl game in each of his 10 seasons, but he was fired in 2009 for mistreatment of one of his players, Adam James, after a concussion; an abrupt end to the greatest era in Red Raiders football.

During the successive tenures of Tommy Tuberville, Kliff Kingsbury and Matt Wells and into the first three years of McGuire's career in Lubbock, the Red Raiders went 94-93 from 2010 to 2024.

When McGuire led the Red Raiders to an upset of the Longhorns in 2022, the last win they'd get over them before Texas left for the SEC, Pickering said tears streamed down her cheeks.

"I don't mind the hate," she said. "Hate us all you want."

The fans have had some lean years. They even lost their beloved tortilla-tossing tradition before kickoffs when Big 12 members voted 15-1 to ban it and implement a 15-yard penalty if they broke the new rule. Texas Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt was initially defiant, saying, "We know that as Red Raiders, no one tells us what to do." But after the Big 12 increased the punishment to a $100,000 fine, Hocutt and McGuire had to have a news conference to tell fans to stop. But they were not -- and are not -- happy about it.

After every win these days Pickering shows her appreciation by baking a cobbler and driving it to Coach McGuire's house. He began taking it to their coaches' dinner on Sundays, so she had to supersize her operation, buying an oversized deep-dish pizza pan and a thermal carrier. After quarterback Thomas Castellanos engineered a bounce-back win over No. 22 Arizona this season, saving the Red Raiders' 2026 playoff hopes, Lugene went to the store looking for blackberries, blueberries and raspberries and whipped up a triple-berry cobbler.

On a note on the big red bag, she wrote: "FOR A BERRY, BERRY, BERRY GOOD WIN."

IX. Rules

Many men have tried to turn their alma maters into blue bloods, but it's a rare feat in the history of the sport. Oklahoma State's billionaire booster, T. Boone Pickens, propelled the Cowboys to the stoop but couldn't quite kick the door down. Oregon has Phil Knight's shoe money, connections and staying power, but hasn't leveraged them into a national title.

Texas Tech might have their new oilman, but Campbell is not alone. Dusty Womble, whose name is on the football and basketball facilities after donating more than $30 million, led the charge in making basketball a powerhouse. Gary Petersen, an oil and gas executive and a minority owner of the Houston Astros and Houston Texans, gave $7 million for an athletics performance center back in 2016. Sellers and his wife Tracy, who played softball at Texas Tech, gave $11 million to athletics in 2022, including $1 million for a renovation of the softball stadium.

One of the biggest ambitions of the Protect College Sports Act is to enforce rules around payments to players, such as the $21.58 million this year that is supposed to be regulated by the College Sports Commission as a result of the House settlement that allowed for NIL payments. But according to industry sources that help facilitate these payments, roughly 30 football teams have a payroll of $30 million or more, circumventing the rules by paying through endorsement deals. About half of those teams, including Texas Tech, have payrolls that exceed $40 million. This puts the Red Raiders at the top of the Big 12, and it's not close.

Campbell believes universities might have to stop funding women's sports and Olympic sports to keep up with the funding race, and that smaller schools will pay the price in football, too.

"I love my school, but I love the whole ecosystem. It doesn't just need to be a few schools that have it all, and that's what we're headed toward," he said.

Campbell hops on his Embraer E550 to Washington and meets with the president and the Senate sponsors of the PCSA, Texas' Ted Cruz and Washington's Maria Cantwell, hoping to support a bill that would put a cap on the same money they're throwing around in Lubbock.

"If you want to know how to prevent a bank robbery," Campbell said with a smirk, "ask a bank robber."

Campbell and Texas Tech also would stand to benefit from the new law. The PCSA would dramatically increase the salary cap to $49 million, meaning Tech would remain comfortably among the nation's leaders in funding, and the rest of the Big 12 likely would struggle to keep up. The bill would also cap Power 4 conference membership at 20 schools, prohibiting large conference mergers. So even if the Red Raiders get left out of future realignment scenarios in the SEC and Big Ten, they won't get left behind by a superconference or premier league.

Gabe Feldman, director of the Tulane Sports Law Program and one of the nation's leading experts around legal issues in college sports, thinks Campbell deserves credit for his part in accepting any restrictions at all.

"I think everybody wants strict rules until they're going to be the victim of them," Feldman said.

Mack Brown said traditional brand-name blue bloods like Texas no longer have a massive advantage or an "automatic bid" into the playoff. Indiana, once the losingest program in college football history, won a national championship last year. Campbell said Indiana supports his thesis that the Red Raiders can make this all amount to something. But he also insists he doesn't only want to buy his way to success.

"If you just put us on the same footing in terms of the quality of athletes that we get, we're going to beat most people because we are still going to be West Texas," he said, sitting in that conference room, with photos of articles about his oil field exploits on the wall behind him. "We still are going to be tougher than you. We are going to work harder than you."

If the PCSA fails, which is very possible, there's no guarantee that college football realignment won't reshuffle all the cards, or that the Big Ten and SEC won't break away and start their own superconference. Texas Tech's goal is to be ready come what may.

Campbell's style isn't for everyone. He's made some powerful enemies in college sports along the way. At some point, the question will become: Is the fight in him going to hold Tech back?

"I think that for them to see us as formidable is important," Campbell said.

And then he went on: "I'm just one person and I don't represent the whole university all the time. But the other thing I know is that whatever happens in realignment in the future, the conferences and the schools are going to make the decisions that are in their financial best interest. It's not going to be a personal decision. It never is."

And then he concluded: "If they thought they could make a lot of money off of us, they would have brought us in when they realigned last time. Those decisions are made in a very cold, calculated, financially driven way."

X. The scorched earth

After a long, hot summer in which Tech was embroiled in controversy and the fallout of the Sorsby saga, well-heeled Red Raiders insiders mingled in the swanky Buddy Holly Hall in downtown Lubbock.

It was the night before Tech faced Abilene Christian, and they'd gathered to preview a new Paramount+ series about their heroes, "The Program: Texas Tech," featuring a presentation with Micah Brown, the show's director. Cocktails were flowing -- Wreck 'Em Whiskeys, Scarlet Spritzes, McGuire Martinis and Raider Ritas -- as they waited to get a first look at the series.

Once the program started in the Crickets Theater, Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt took the stage and told the crowd the message Coach McGuire would deliver to the team the next day.

He referenced a scene from the western "Tombstone," after Wyatt Earp's brothers were killed, where Sherman McMasters tells Doc Holliday that he understood Earp's desire for revenge.

"Make no mistake," Hocutt says, repeating Holliday's line. "It's not revenge he's after, it's a reckoning." The crowd roared, ready to witness it.

Brown told the audience that what he had seen during the shooting of the series was different from how the Red Raiders had been portrayed nationally. "Typical," one of the crowd members said.

In the series, which had debuted nationally that day, Campbell spoke in similar terms, saying Texas Tech will have "retribution" on its mind all season, and will make certain opponents feel it when they're up by 40 and still throwing the ball in the fourth quarter.

The next day, the 2026 season kicked off at the newly christened Galaxy Stadium -- renamed after a 15-year, $75 million naming rights deal for "a global leader in data center infrastructure and digital assets" -- and a sellout crowd awaited the debut of quarterback Will Hammond back from a knee injury, which was the reason the Red Raiders had signed Brendan Sorsby in the first place.

Outside, the hosts of the local sports station, Double T 97.3, made their predictions during a live broadcast. One was thinking 59-0. The other picked a more modest 56-7. Right before kickoff, a new pregame hype video debuted.

"IT'S US VS. EVERYBODY," the screen announced. After a montage including big plays, radioactive logos, Big 12 title celebration images, oil pumpjacks and nuclear explosions, McGuire said: "So we're the bad guys now. GOOD." The video ends with an image of the Earth burning, leaving behind only a black planet with a searing image of Texas Tech's burning logo.

Shortly after, in the Pickerings' suite, Dr. Tim West watched his Red Raiders, just like he has since 1965. His father, Dirk West, was a legendary Southwest Conference cartoonist known for his caricatures of mascots, a Lubbock city councilman and eventually, the mayor.

Some Texas Tech fans, like Tim West, bristle at wanting to be the villains. But if they don't have any choice, being hated because they're winners is better than being hated because of who they are and where they're from. It's better than being left out altogether.

"We've never had anyone give a flying s--- about us," he said. "The haves say, 'Hey, you can't do that!' and we say, 'Watch me,' and they think that's being obnoxious."

Against ACU, the offense struggled. McGuire's team eventually pulled away for a 33-10 win, a modest showing against an FCS program. "This doesn't look like a playoff team," one fan said.

Wanting more is the new challenge in Lubbock. For these fans, the burden of expectations is novel. It's harder to be happy when you're at the top. Nick Bosh of Houston and William Kelly of Weatherford, fifth-year senior roommates, reminisce about how much has changed during their college careers.

"Freshman year, we would show up at the game 20 minutes before so we could see hot chicks," Kelly said. "Then we'd go to the bar at halftime because we were losing."

"Now we go to the bar at halftime because we're winning by 20," Bosh said.

Bosh said they were happy with 7-5 seasons when they first arrived. But that shutout loss to Oregon in the Orange Bowl left them wanting more.

"It's exciting to finally be one of the big dogs," Bosh said. "I'm going to be upset if we lose more than two games this season and we don't make the Big 12 championship game. It was awesome to make it in the playoffs last season, but the way that we went out was embarrassing. It's just different now."

XI. The most recent utopia

For a century, Tech asked for one thing: a fair fight. Now it has one. It can spend money like anyone else. It can sign players like anyone else. It can build buildings and upgrade facilities like anyone else.

The Womble Football Center is the envy of any in the country, with four stories and 340,000 square feet of new-money flex. The 15,000 square-foot weight room is much bigger than the old one, the Patrick Mahomes walk-through room has a 25-by-20-yard indoor field with a 70-foot LED screen with VR capabilities, which the school says is the biggest of its kind in college or the NFL.

There's a whole wing of doctors' offices that feels like a hospital, a recovery center with hyperbaric and cryo chambers, a hydrotherapy area with hot and cold tubs and an underwater treadmill, along with red light therapy beds and sensory deprivation float beds. Down the hall, there's a barbershop, a gaming lounge, podcast studios and a 200-seat auditorium.

"It's insane," Curry said. "It's like a resort for football. It makes me never want to leave this place."

The beauty is no longer only beneath the ground.

Outside the stadium, there are four reserved parking spots in the shape of the Double T logo. The first one is for McGuire, where he parks his truck or, on Sundays after wins, his red Corvette. Hocutt's is beside it. Then Campbell's. Then Womble's.

Jett Rink got the oil and the money, and the establishment still looked down their noses at him, leaving him bitter and last seen drunk and incoherently mumbling to an empty room.

But like Rink, just having the money doesn't guarantee respect. Or success. The Aggies have been flush with cash for years and haven't won a national championship since 1939. The Longhorns have one national title since 1970. Texas Tech might already have changed its history. The most disregarded school in Texas in the most isolated location in the Power 4 is the topic of national discussion. Now what?

Campbell believes that all this spending goes beyond just wins and losses, or another rich guy trying to settle old scores. He believes football success matters here. Texas Tech set a fall enrollment record with 46,296 students this year, up by more than 15% since 2024.

"You don't drive down I-35 and see us every day and we're not front of mind unless we're on TV or unless we're being reported on in the media," he said. "We need that exposure. It's really critical to our survival as a university."

You can expect the Red Raiders to be aggressive in the portal again next year, especially at quarterback. And they have a top-10 high school recruiting class -- sandwiched between Texas and Michigan right now in ESPN's recruiting rankings -- that includes the No. 1 prospect in the country, Jalen Brewster, a 5-star defensive lineman, the kind of talent that has never arrived in Lubbock from high school before.

Lugene Pickering's father died believing that good things would come next year.

"I just wish my dad could be here to see it because he just believed so deeply that we were going to make it," she said. "It took my whole lifetime to do it."

The new building rising out of the Lubbock plains looks more like Reata, the sprawling mansion in "Giant," than what Tech used to be. But the old courthouses in dying West Texas towns are evidence that nothing lasts forever, and that the boom-and-bust cycle is a deep part of the state's history.

Can they outrun it? Is the modern oil field something different?

"We have learned our lessons from the boom-and-bust cycles. We don't borrow money like we used to. We don't overproduce and overspend whenever times are good and then shut it down," Campbell said. "I'm not reckless at all, even though it might be perceived that way."

XII. Grand visions

It's hard to make things that stick here.

In 1928, after the Santa Rita proved the vast potential of the Permian, production was booming, but there were few options for storing or shipping the oil. Roxana Petroleum built an enormous tank in Monahans, about 175 miles southwest of Lubbock, to hold a million barrels, about 35 feet deep covering 8 acres, with a massive domed top made from California redwoods.

Engineers failed to account for one thing: the weight of the oil. The only time the tank was filled, 1,084,000 gallons of West Texas crude added up to 315 million pounds, and it seeped through the seams of the concrete floor right back into the sand below. Shell Oil, which owned Roxana, abandoned the project.

In 1954, local resident Wayne Long bought the tank site for about $30,000 with dreams of making it a man-made lake in the middle of West Texas. His wife said he drilled 11 wells to find water for it, striking oil on nine of them and water on only two. It took four years to fill the tank with water completely. On Oct. 5, 1958, he opened Melody Park with a water-skiing act from Austin. But the same leaks and evaporation that doomed the oil tank cost Wayne Long his water. His lake closed the day after it opened.

Someone later tried to turn the lake site into a stock car track. Today, Monahans is home to a museum, The Million Barrel Museum, which commemorates the building of the failed tank.

XIII. Seeing red

Taylor Sheridan began his career as an unpedigreed actor who fought to get paid as much as his co-stars. When he was told he was replaceable, he decided to produce his own screenplays. Now, as one of the most successful franchise creators in television history, he presides over an empire. He sees himself in the Raiders. Or sees their story in his.

"You want the world to watch because that's how you get the notoriety. There's all these benefits to it," he said.

Sheridan, a die-hard Texas college football fan, always admired the Tech teams that were outmanned and had a roster of players who may not have had the perfect measurables, but they looked like they'd practiced in 108-degree heat. Now, they've got the money and the pedigreed players. They've got the burden of expectations, too.

"There's also a whole lot of hooks hanging off that," Sheridan said. "You've got to be mindful. You can't give the world ammunition. People weren't paying attention before. They're paying attention now."

Joey McGuire has overseen the Red Raiders' shift from underdogs to black-hat villains. The energetic coach who won three state championships as a high school coach has never shied away from making bold proclamations. After that 2022 Texas upset, he declared: "The country's gonna find out, everything runs through Lubbock!" That phrase now adorns a wall inside the Tech football building.

After that October loss on the road to Cincinnati, the confident facade came down. The offense struggled and the defense was gashed for big plays. There was extra heat on the game too, with Cincinnati still seeking $1 million from Brendan Sorsby after suing him in federal court in February for breaching his contract with the school when he transferred to Texas Tech. Cincinnati coach Scott Satterfield acknowledged afterward that the game was circled when the schedule came out. As the game was winding down, the Bearcats played "All My Ex's Live In Texas" over the Nippert Stadium PA system, and their social media team tagged Cody Campbell in the final score graphic.

The bravado of the summer was gone. For the first time, there were real doubts about this season.

"There is no excuse or reason to lose a game like this," Campbell posted on X. "We have to be better." The post got more than a million views and 4,700 likes. USA Today wrote a column saying Campbell's response was evidence that college football teams have owners now. The market for Texas Tech schadenfreude was open.

On Oct. 31, when Arizona arrived for the next game, it was 55 degrees for an 11 a.m. kickoff, and newsprint-gray clouds muted the sky. The game was announced as a sellout, but it appeared as if thousands of fans dressed up as empty seats for Halloween.

McGuire made a surprise move and benched Hammond for Castellanos, an under-the-radar signing who committed to Texas Tech on Aug. 26, just 10 days before the Abilene Christian game.

He ignited the offense and the crowd with his legs, throwing for 144 yards and two touchdowns and rushing for 117 and another score. The Red Raiders rushed for 328 yards, second most in the past century in Lubbock. The stadium exulted when J'Koby Williams broke a career-long 64-yard touchdown, running free to put the game away.

The clouds lifted. The sun shone.

McGuire's voice shook with emotion in a postgame interview on television about a tough week. Campbell posted the clip, saying McGuire was "a good man, a great coach, and is the genuine article." McGuire said he was crushed that he'd let the university down against Cincinnati.

"What are you driven by? We chose this. We chose to be in a performance-based profession that, hey, if you win, good things are going to happen, and if you lose, you're going to lose your job," McGuire said after the win over Arizona, after so much noise surrounded his program despite one regular-season loss in two years. "And it just may happen a little bit faster with the amount of money that people are investing in the programs than what it did in the past."

The original oil-soaked wooden Santa Rita derrick was dismantled in 1940 and moved to Austin. It was celebrated during a national broadcast of the A&M-Texas game in 1958 and still sits on the Texas campus today.

In a tailgate lot outside the stadium in Lubbock, Thomas Parker, who runs a farmer-owned dairy co-op, wore a "Come and Take It" shirt with the flag of the first battle of the Texas Revolution on the back at a pregame tailgate. He moved to Lubbock from East Texas more than 40 years ago to attend Tech and never left.

"The blue bloods' advantages were behind doors, behind buildings, under curtains," Parker said amid a tailgate with his family, holding a cold beer in a lot on the west side of Galaxy Stadium, a couple hundred yards from a giant red-and-black oil pumpjack with "TEXAS TECH" bolted on it. "We just didn't have the right money. And we do now."

"We will dig deeper. We will get harder. We will find things to make us go where we need to go," he said.

Across the street from campus at Red Raider Outfitter, T-shirts that say "Beat Texas" and "Horns Down" hang on the racks, part of an entire section devoted to the lost rivalry, with no games between the teams on the schedule moving forward. The Red Raiders last played Texas in 2023 in Austin, a year after that upset in Lubbock that brought tears to Lugene's face. They lost 57-7.

The Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium jumbotron showed the final scene of "Toy Story 3" where Andy drives away and leaves the toys behind, a nod to Texas' departure for the SEC, as fans laughed. Despite the lopsided score, a huge crowd of Longhorns stayed to celebrate, a party for the final indignity in the rivalry.

A lot has changed since that day. This season, losing Sorsby looked like the latest West Texas bust. Tech's offense was scuffling, and the loss to Cincinnati revealed deeper flaws on defense. But in the type of aggressive move that the Red Raiders make now, they added Castellanos as a luxury on Aug. 29, just one week before the season. In last week's 53-48 win over West Virginia, he starred with 362 yards and a career-high five touchdowns passing and rushed for 102 more in a shootout that would've made Mike Leach proud.

Texas is sixth in the College Football Playoff rankings right now. Texas Tech is 12th.

"I wish they would play us, I do," Pickering said wistfully, as if she were carrying the aspirations of a generation of Tech fans, as if she were thinking about her father.

"Just one more time," she said. "It won't hurt. Too bad."