Justin Williams
By Justin Williams
The Athletic
(First of a series)
Somewhere high above the plains of West Texas, the Big 12 championship
trophy sat buckled safely beside Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire, headed
home to Lubbock.
McGuire’s wife, Debbie, stayed behind in Dallas with family following
the Red Raiders’ conference title win over BYU on Dec. 6. It saved her
husband from a difficult decision on seating arrangements.
“The trophy was strapped into her seat,” said McGuire. “She might have
had to move if she flew back with us, because that trophy was going to
stay really close to me.”
It was a shimmering token of Texas Tech football’s 12-1 season and
first outright conference championship since 1955, the team’s ticket
to a top four seed and first-round bye in the College Football
Playoff. It also represented an ambition stated and realized, a
memento that rallied a fan base together and brought billionaires to
tears. Winning that trophy wasn’t easy, or cheap, but the payoff was
priceless.
For McGuire in particular, the precious cargo represented validation
for a former high school coach whose boundless energy and optimism
elevated a program so desperately pining for it. McGuire embraced
Texas Tech — and Lubbock, and West Texas — for exactly what it is and
steered it somewhere it’s never been.
“This is what people wanted out here in West Texas: a very genuine guy
who is going to find any way he can to win football games,” said
quarterback Behren Morton. “I love that man. He’s done a lot for this
program.”
The Red Raiders have been one of the main plot lines of this college
football season, a traditionally scrappy challenger turned contender
suddenly flush with oil money. Coming off an 8-5 season in 2024, the
team loudly and proudly spent $25 million on this year’s roster,
putting a “Big 12 title or bust” bull’s-eye on its back.
“The last box (to check) is, Texas Tech has never won the Big 12,
never played in the Big 12 championship,” McGuire told The Athletic
this summer. “That’s why this year is so critical.”
Mission accomplished. While there is grumbling about buying a
championship, Tech fans will sip those sour grapes as they cheer on
their Red Raiders against Oregon on New Year’s Day in the Orange Bowl,
dreaming of another championship run.
Nobody understands better than McGuire what it took for Texas Tech to
get this far. The money, and Tech’s willingness to acknowledge it,
carried outsized expectations, privately and publicly. And McGuire was
the one charged with building the staff, directing the dollars,
signing off on the roster and leading the team, all while managing the
egos and aspirations inside and outside the locker room.
“That’s his greatest strength — he makes teams,” said Cody Campbell,
the university board chair and mega-booster who led Tech’s
donor-funded boon. “He’s made to bring people together and lead them,
get them to all pull the rope the same direction. He’s the perfect guy
for this place.”
McGuire addressed it straight on, starting in preseason camp. He had
daily messages for the team pulled from “The Mindset of a Champion,”
an audiobook by sports psychologist David Cook.
“We were going to run to the pressure,” McGuire said. “Not run from it.”
He put together a slide he’s referenced all season, with messages such
as “Mental toughness is a choice!” and “Never allow anxiety to replace
what you know is true.”
“We all listen to the pressure. You can’t ignore it. But it’s about
how you deal with it,” he added.
McGuire has always been one to bet on himself, the type who believes
doubt kills more dreams than failure. That positivity can be
infectious.
“Everyone loves Joey. When you talk to him, you’re the most important
thing in the world,” said Texas Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt.
“He just leaves you wanting more of whatever it is he’s got.”
It’s why Hocutt hired him. McGuire, 54, came up through the high
school coaching ranks, equivalent to knighthood in Texas. In 14
seasons as the head coach at Cedar Hill High, just southwest of
Dallas, McGuire won a trio of state championships and also finished
runner-up. The lifelong Texan joined the Baylor staff in 2017 as an
assistant under Matt Rhule.
In October 2021, Texas Tech fired head coach Matt Wells eight games
into his third season. McGuire had never even been a college
coordinator, and Tech was in the market for someone with head coaching
experience. It didn’t deter McGuire — and a small army of advocates —
from reaching out to the search committee.
“We just kept getting calls from random people telling us we had to
talk to Joey McGuire,” said Campbell. “His relentlessness is honestly
what impressed me.”
Hocutt and the search committee finally agreed to meet with McGuire,
partly to stem the surge of calls. McGuire won them over instead. He
was hired on Nov. 8, 2021.
Just months into the name, image and likeness era that allowed college
athletes to be compensated, there were a number of deep-pocketed Tech
donors ready to invest heavily in athletics, most of whom had made a
fortune in the local oil and gas industry. But that support was
desperate for a unifying voice.
McGuire’s charisma picked the lock, activating those stakeholders and
wrapping arms around a fan base still fissured over the 2009 departure
of former coach Mike Leach. A year after McGuire was hired, Texas Tech
broke ground on a $242 million football facility and stadium project,
and The Matador Club, operated by Campbell and John Sellers, became
one of the preeminent NIL collectives.
McGuire stripped away the traditional barriers to alignment. Every
offseason, the Texas Tech football staff goes on an offsite coaches’
retreat — Cabo one year, Vegas another. A handful of top donors are
invited, sitting in on strategy meetings and deepening connections.
“Joey understands that’s part of the job these days, where I think
some who have been in coaching a long time have a hard time
adjusting,” said Campbell. “Your boosters are part of the team — you
have to coach them up and lead them, just like your players.”
Tech went a combined 23-16 over McGuire’s first three seasons —
promising, yet not up to expectations. However, the Red Raiders
entered 2025 with an encouraging staff in place, including first-year
coordinators Mack Leftwich (offense) and Shiel Wood (defense), and the
finances to add 21 incoming transfers, shelling out top dollar for one
of the top-rated portal hauls.
Externally, the heat was on Tech to win and justify the $25 million
splurge. Internally, a team with fresh faces and big, pricey
personalities had to establish a winning culture that could meet those
demands. The program’s brain trust made a concerted effort to identify
the right mix of players and personas, but it still needed a coach to
motivate and navigate through adversity.
One of McGuire’s first moves was to put newcomers like defensive
tackle Lee Hunter and safety Cole Wisniewski in his group text with
team leaders.
“I could always take them out, but I wanted them to feel like they had
a voice on this team from the beginning,” said McGuire.
He balanced it by empowering certain returning players, like Morton,
to take ownership of integrating the newcomers, banking on the equity
he’d built over multiple seasons. One of the misconceptions about Tech
this season is that it was all one-year hired guns. The top-end
additions got the team over the hump, but of the 22 players that
earned all-conference honors in 2025, 13 were returning players.
Morton, a fifth-year senior, has a special bond with McGuire and Tech.
He was born in Lubbock, the son of James Morton, another legendary
Texas high school coach. Despite being recruited to Tech by the
previous coaching staff as the highest-rated quarterback recruit in
program history, he elected to stay on under McGuire, starting 35
games and counting over the past four years.
“His first team meeting, I called my dad after and told him that he
and coach McGuire are, like, the exact same,” said Morton. “The way he
connects with all 100-something guys on the team, it’s really cool.”
Still a high school coach at heart, McGuire cultivated that persona at
the college level, with the stones to acknowledge the money the
program has invested, to run to the pressure, and to publicly leave an
open spot in the trophy room for this year’s Big 12 championship
hardware. It doesn’t waver, either, like when Tech finished 8-5 last
season. Or lost at Arizona State in October with Morton sidelined due
to injury.
“He’s always the same guy with the same energy,” said All-American
linebacker Jacob Rodriguez. “That’s nice to be around. It’s not
fourth-and-one every single day.”
The Red Raiders rebounded from that loss to ASU with six straight
wins, all by at least three touchdowns, including two over a top-12
BYU. An explosive offense that averaged 42.5 points per game, second
most in college football, paired perfectly with a stingy, top-three
defense.
“I’ve never seen anyone relate to and love their players the way Joey
does,” said Hocutt. “Everybody wants to talk about the money, but
you’ve seen other programs try to do the same thing and it’s not
successful. Joey deserves so much credit.”
He got some in the form of a contract extension through the 2032
season, paying him roughly $7 million per year plus incentives.
General manager James Blanchard and all three coordinators are signed
through 2028, positioning the well-resourced Red Raiders to remain
contenders.
McGuire, three games away from a national title, is not big on
Gatorade victory baths: At Cedar Hill, the occasion was reserved for
state championships; district titles, of which McGuire won seven in 14
seasons, were expected. But the program’s first Big 12 championship
met that big-game standard, McGuire letting the Gatorade wash over him
in the closing seconds.
“Not taking away from anybody I’ve coached or played against, but that
win was by far the coolest experience,” said McGuire. “Now we’re gonna
try to make some more memories.”
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