Misery Index: Texas Tech's big money and bigger talk can't save it from embarrassing loss

At Texas Tech, there is only one voice that matters. And when the de facto team owner isn’t happy, nobody’s happy. 

Mega-booster Cody Campbell doesn’t play, doesn’t coach, isn’t the athletic director or the school president. But he does have a checkbook that funds Texas Tech’s national ambitions through an impressive level of spending on NIL deals. If college football had a Jerry Jones, it would be Campbell. So when Campbell’s mad about the state of affairs in Lubbock, everyone should be on high alert.

“There is no excuse or reason to lose a game like this,” Campbell posted on X after a pretty one-sided 37-24 loss to Cincinnati. “We have to be better.” 

There is, of course, a backstory here that involves Campbell’s ego. After last season, Texas Tech signed former Cincinnati quarterback Brandon Sorsby to a huge deal after he entered the transfer portal. That was nothing new; Campbell’s vast reservoir of dollars were deployed in the portal to great effect last season as the Red Raiders went 12-2, won the Big 12 and made the College Football Playoff. 

But Campbell’s grand design hit a snag during the summer when Sorsby was ruled ineligible for violating one of the few rules people in college sports still take seriously. Earlier in his career, Sorsby gambled on games his team was involved in, and there was no dispute about the evidence. Despite Campbell’s best efforts to engineer a legislative or political solution that would allow Sorsby to play, he ultimately lost a standoff to the Big 12. 

At Texas Tech, however, the Red Raiders didn’t point the finger at themselves for making a bad bet (no pun intended). Rather, they blamed Cincinnati and promised revenge on the field.  

“I think this is something that could have been handled much more privately,” Campbell said in a four-part documentary series about Texas Tech that aired on Paramount Plus. “We’re not going to forget about that, and I don’t think they’ll forget about it either when we’re up by 40 and still throwing the ball in the fourth quarter. That’s where the retribution will come.”

Newsflash: The retribution did not come. Texas Tech was run out of the building, and though it was only the Red Raiders’ first loss this season, it felt like a long time coming. Since the very beginning of the season, Texas Tech has been walking a tightrope of continuing to win while looking kind of underwhelming most of the time. 

Last season, you could watch Texas Tech and see a clear talent differential with the rest of the Big 12. This year, the Red Raiders looked fortunate to squeak by several teams.

It was only a matter of time before someone delivered a dose of humility, and much of the college football world spent Saturday celebrating it. 

Though Campbell may believe he’s taken a front-facing role in the politics of college sports for all the right reasons, he’s made himself a target for a lot of criticism and suspicion. Campbell’s close relationship with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has had a huge impact on how the Protect College Sports Act was written, and some of the provisions that were written into the bill at Campbell’s request have made the politics of passing it more complicated.

But on a more local level, Campbell’s postgame tweet is an eyebrow raiser for head coach Joey McGuire and athletic director Kirby Hocutt. They serve at the pleasure of their money man, and even though Texas Tech is a 6-1 football team with a good chance (still) to make the CFP, his social media muscles did not suggest a lot of patience or understanding for a bad day at the office.

If Campbell doesn’t think there’s much excuse for this loss, nobody in Texas Tech land should either. That’s why the Red Raiders are America’s most miserable fan base in Week 8.

Conference Champions of Misery 

ACC: At this time a year ago, Georgia Tech seemed like a good bet to make the CFP. With Haynes King at quarterback, the Yellow Jackets were 8-0, ranked in the top-10 and had a really favorable schedule all the way until the regular season finale against Georgia. Then when the calendar flipped to November, the bottom fell out. An upset loss at NC State started a spiral of four losses in five games to end the season. When you extend that streak out to the start of this year — minus King, who ran out of eligibility, and offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner, who went to Florida — Georgia Tech has lost nine of its last 11 to FBS opponents. And its most recent embarrassment, a 49-27 loss at home to Boston College, marks the moment where it’s necessary to have some uncomfortable conversations about the state of the program. Though B.C. has played decent football lately and Georgia Tech had a bunch of people out on defense due to injury, the Yellow Jackets were not supposed to fall to the bottom of the league this season. In fact, they were picked fifth in the ACC preseason poll with a couple first-place votes. But everything this year has been sub-standard for the 2-5 Yellow Jackets, starting with a disappointing offensive line and a running game that just hasn’t been good enough against decent defensive fronts. Coach Brent Key got a contract extension through 2030 after last season, but we don’t sugarcoat things here at the Misery Index — there are real reasons to be concerned about some of his staff decisions and whether the success in recent years was more about King and Faulkner than anyone currently involved in the program. 

Big Ten: We usually give grace to teams that lose their starting quarterback to injury. But the concern at Oregon goes beyond what happened on Sept. 26 when Dante Moore suffered a concussion. If Oregon is really the program most people think it is, it’s hard to believe the quarterback makes this much of a difference. In the aftermath of Oregon’s 21-10 loss at Illinois, we can pretty much eliminate the Ducks from College Football Playoff contention. They’re 4-3 with some tough games left, there’s no indication when or if Moore is coming back, and it may not matter anyway because the Ducks are generally inept on offense in a way that even prime Tom Brady would struggle to overcome. Since Moore went down, Oregon has scored 15 points against UCLA, 17 against Nebraska and now 10 against Illinois. And there’s a reason it’s causing fans to wonder how much brain power Oregon’s program lost when former offensive coordinator Will Stein left to take over as head coach at Kentucky. Regardless of quarterback, this isn’t the standard we’re used to seeing from Oregon under Dan Lanning. And even when Moore was healthy, things have felt off this season, starting with that bizarre loss at Oklahoma State in Week 2. For the first time since Lanning became head coach, Oregon is going to have to navigate some true adversity. 

SEC: If Tennessee misses the CFP, the last 10 minutes of their 27-24 loss to South Carolina are going to haunt coach Josh Heupel’s psyche for the rest of his career. Leading 24-17, and having stopped the Gamecocks on five straight possessions, it looked like Tennessee had total control of the situation. And if the Vols had simply converted a fourth-and-1 from South Carolina’s 38-yard line with about 3 1/2 minutes left, they would have almost certainly won the game and moved into the bye week with an impressive 7-1 record. But a really bad play call in that moment, which left quarterback George MacIntyre with no other option than to get tackled behind the line of scrimmage, opened the door for the Gamecocks to mount a rally. After South Carolina tied the game with a touchdown, the Vols should have at worst been in overtime. But because they couldn’t protect MacIntyre once again, they turned it over on a fumble with 33 seconds left. South Carolina only needed a handful of yards to get in field goal range, and Malik Orsan nailed a 48-yarder to win the game. The fallout from almost-certain victory to gutting defeat will be arguably the biggest coaching challenge of Heupel’s career as Tennessee prepares for games against Kentucky and LSU that are probably must-wins if the Vols want to play meaningful games in December. 

Group of Six: The decision-makers at Northern Illinois have a lot to answer for. As the Mountain West splintered in 2024, the leftovers that didn’t go to the resurrected Pac-12 needed to backfill with teams to keep their league afloat. NIU, arguably the most successful MAC program this century, decided to jump at the opportunity to “upgrade” conferences even though it didn’t fit geographically, would require more financial investment to compete in football and required the school to park its other sports in the Horizon League. “It really wasn’t about leaving the MAC as much as self-preservation and sustainability for us,” athletic director Sean Frazier told Sports Illustrated. While it’s too early to render a final judgment on the wisdom of that move, NIU’s first year in the Mountain West has been an absolute disaster. After a 56-21 loss at home to previously 1-6 Hawaii, the Huskies are winless on the season and are getting crushed week after week. The only game they’ve even come close to winning was a 28-24 loss to Illinois State, a good FCS team but a result that tells you Northern Illinois was in no position to join a tougher conference. And what’s the long-term upside, really? In the MAC, Northern Illinois was among similar schools with similar challenges. The league they’re in now is whole new ballgame and they’ve dug themselves a hole that could take years to climb out of. 

Headset Misery

Lincoln Riley: If you join the Big Ten, you’re going to have to win games in the Central and Eastern time zones. That’s what Southern Cal signed up for when it blew up the Pac-12. Unfortunately for the Trojans, it’s not their head coach’s forte. USC’s 24-7 loss at Wisconsin had all the hallmarks of a Riley-coached team playing outside its comfort zone. They were soft, mistake-prone, penalty-laden and ineffective. At 6-2, the Trojans aren’t out of the playoff picture, but they are a program you cannot possibly believe in as a fan because nothing really gets fixed and the flaws have remained the same since Day 1 despite all kinds of staff changes and monetary investments into the program. And one of those flaws is that USC consistently plays awful football when it has to leave the West Coast. Since joining the Big Ten, Southern Cal is 4-7 in games played outside the Pacific time zone, and it’s not like the wins (against Purdue, Nebraska, Rutgers and this year’s underwhelming Penn State team) have been super impressive either. After this loss, USC is clearly approaching a crossroads with Riley. He’s owed a ton of money and there’s no obvious home run candidate for the job, but athletic director Jen Cohen can’t settle for the kind of mediocrity that USC is putting on the field time and time again. 

Sonny Dykes: Could a coach who was in the national championship game just four years ago and won nine games in both 2024 and 2025 be in danger of losing his job this season? It is certainly within the realm of possibility at TCU after a stunning 24-20 loss at home to West Virginia. It’s even more painful for the Frogs because they outgained West Virginia 484-265 but only managed to put 20 points on the board against a team whose defense hadn’t stopped anyone all season. But this time, with the game on the line, West Virginia managed to create a fumble that sealed the deal after the Frogs had marched to the 14-yard line in the final minute. It was a game that confirmed all the narratives that have put Dykes’ name into hot-seat talk: Sloppy football with three turnovers, inability to execute in critical situations like third downs and coming up on the wrong end of one-score games. In fact, TCU is 3-4 having lost all four of those games by a combined 24 points. Being close, though, does not count for much at a program that feels (and rightly so) that it should be among the top three or four in the Big 12 most years due to its location in Fort Worth and deep bench of big-money boosters. Since the title game run in 2022, TCU has finished ninth, fifth and seventh in the league, with this season looking no better. If Dykes gets dumped, that’ll be why. 

Dave Aranda: Two weeks ago, it looked like Baylor was headed for the type of season that would save Aranda’s job. After flirting with the hot seat for a couple years, Baylor was 4-1 and playing well with enough winnable games ahead to plot a path to 7-5 or 8-4. Keep in mind, athletic director Doug McNamee is in his first year and did not come in looking for an immediate coaching change. If anything, the hope at Baylor was that Aranda would win enough to buy the new administration some time. But after last week’s faceplant at home against TCU and Saturday’s 25-24 loss at Kansas, the trajectory has changed. Yes, this was Baylor’s second one-point loss of the season (they lost 17-16 to Auburn in the season opener), but in this one Baylor blew a 21-10 lead heading into the fourth quarter. Then, after driving into field goal range with a chance to retake the lead in the final seconds, Aranda went super conservative, settled for a 45-yard attempt and had it blocked. With a finishing stretch of BYU, Texas Tech and Houston — all games in which Baylor will be a significant underdog — decision time is coming soon. 

Moments of Misery

Dabo Swinney: The list of things that should humble Clemson is long by this point. But has there ever been a better reminder of how much time and goodwill Swinney has wasted than getting passed by Virginia Tech in one year under James Franklin? The Hokies’ 20-16 victory at Clemson, dropping the Tigers to 4-3, will not get much attention because neither of these teams is particularly relevant to what’s happening nationally this season. But it’s a really interesting story of how programs can fix themselves in the modern era when they decide they want to. After a decade of bad football, Virginia Tech got tired of losing so it decided to invest more money into the roster, hired a coach with a track record of rebuilding programs and has seen immediate returns with a 6-2 record. Clemson, by contrast, has been held hostage by a coach who looks backward instead of forward, doesn’t innovate, doesn’t any feel any pressure to adapt or improve and promises things he can no longer deliver in this era using the formula that won him a couple national titles in the old era. This year’s big change was rehiring Chad Morris as offensive coordinator, but the Tigers have scored 91 total points this season against five power conference opponents. That’s 18.2 points per game. There is no level of football where that gets the job done.

Marcel’s miscue: Late in the third quarter at Alabama, everything was lined up for Texas A&M to turn around its season. The Aggies were leading 20-17, they had the ball near midfield and they were probably just a few plays away from really putting the squeeze onto Kalen DeBoer and the Crimson Tide. Facing fourth-and-1 from its own 45-yard line, Texas A&M coach Mike Elko lined up to go for it. But when the ball was snapped, quarterback Marcel Reed was not ready for it. Reed had played his best football of the year Saturday, ending any thought of a mid-game quarterback change. But after Reed fumbled that snap, the Aggies never recovered. Alabama scored four plays later, built its lead to 31-20 on on the next possession and Texas A&M didn’t get another first down the rest of the game. 

Big 12 bananaland: You’d have to go deep into the rulebook to make sense of several things that happened at the end of UCF’s 39-31 upset over unbeaten BYU in double overtime. Particularly at the end of regulation, when an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty gave UCF a chance to kick a game-winning field goal — which got blocked, setting off a chain reaction of rules interpretations. It seemed like pure chaos, but the ire of BYU fans should go to a roughing the kicker call against the Cougars in the second overtime, which nullified a field goal and ultimately allowed UCF to score the game-winning touchdown. To put it kindly, it wasn’t a good call. The only reason the kicker took any contact was because his offensive lineman got run over and the resulting tangle of bodies kind of rolled into the kicker’s leg well after the kick had been made. There was no reason to make that call, particularly in such a high-leverage moment. On the heels of last week’s clock debacle that worked out in BYU’s favor against Notre Dame, it hasn’t been a great stretch for Big 12 officiating. But it has been a great stretch for Big 12 parity. Any of the top six teams in the league can win the thing.