Texas Tech Has Cracked The Code To Championship-Level Recruiting
These are uncharted waters for the folks out in Lubbock.
With the college football offseason in full swing, recruiting becomes a huge focus for the average fan.
Recruiting is a 365 day-a-year endeavor for anyone with any skin in the game in college football, but the awareness becomes heightened when you reach the doldrums of late spring and early summer.
With all that being said, I was perusing some of the recruiting classes for this upcoming cycle, and one team stood out to me.
It shouldn't shock anyone who has followed my work at OutKick for the past year, but I believe the Texas Tech Red Raiders are becoming a problem on the recruiting trail.
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As of April 17, the Red Raiders have a consensus top-10 class on both of the major college football industry recruiting sites, and have the 2nd ranked class on Rivals.
Tech has had top-10 classes early on in recruiting cycles of the past, but what stands out about this latest batch of commits is that they aren't ranked this high because of quantity, but rather quantity.
In days of old, the Red Raiders would load up on a bunch of three-star prospects long before anyone else filled out their classes, and they would sit comfortably in the upper echelon of recruiting ranking lists until the "bog dogs" started grabbing their preferred targets.
Take a look at this current 2027 class for Texas Tech, and you will find the majority of their commits ranked comfortably inside the top-100.
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Of the seven verbal commits the Red Raiders currently hold in their 2027 recruiting class, four are in the top-50 nationally, with two more inside the top-200.
These are uncharted waters for the folks out in Lubbock, and that's good news for the health of their program.
These are early returns that make the Red Raiders' recruiting apparatus look closer to Georgia than Texas Tech teams of the past, but it's not just about the star ranking either.
Tech's two highest-rated prospects in their 2027 class play along the defensive line, including the number one overall player, defensive tackle Jalen Brewster.
Not to be outdone by the d-line, the offensive line is getting a makeover on the recruiting trail as well.
After landing one of the best offensive tackle prospects in the country last cycle in five-star Felix Ojo, the Red Raiders will be looking to spend big on that side of the ball again in 2027.
College football is still a line of scrimmage league, and all the elite programs in the Big Ten and SEC have NFL talent up and down both trenches.
The Red Raiders have figured that out, and have retooled their recruiting approach to reflect that.
I opined last summer that the Red Raiders were starting to get this thing figured out, but I needed to see sustained success on the recruiting trail to consider them one of the "big boy" programs in college football.
The 2027 cycle is still several months away from being completed, but consider this a massive step in the right direction.
It might finally be time to count Texas Tech as a force to be reckoned with in the national landscape of college football, because if their recruiting moves are any indication, the Red Raiders are here to stay.