Texas Tech Football Going 7-5 Is Good Enough, Right?

The "Hot Hand Fallacy" is a theory that there is no such thing as a hot streak in sports. The theory states that instead of a "hot hand," there's just good stretches and bad stretches that add up to an average.

The theory fits in any sport. In baseball, say a career .250 hitter all of a sudden has a month where he hit .300. If you subscribe to the hot hand fallacy, you can reasonably expect a stretch coming where that player hits .200.

It's not a hot streak and a cold streak; he's just a .250 hitter.

In football, a quarterback isn't terrible one week with a 55 percent completion percentage and great the next when he completes 75 percent. He's just an average quarterback with a 65 percent completion percentage.

I think that can be applied to entire franchises and programs.

The New England Patriots will inevitably fall back into NFL obscurity (eventually). The Dallas Cowboys have come back to prominence. The Los Angeles Lakers won't stay down forever.

With that in mind, isn't Texas Tech going 7-5 good enough? The all-time winning percentage at Texas Tech is .560. That's somewhere in between 6-6 and 7-5.

Kliff Kingsbury is 24-26 as the head coach at Texas Tech. A seven-win season would make him 31-31. After a bowl win, and an 8-5 record, Kingsbury would be 32-31, or a .508 winning percentage. In the world where history is cyclical, it feels right for the Red Raiders to float back above .500 in 2017.

I also think 7-5 is a perfect expectation for this team.

A stacked receiver corps. An improved linebacker unit. An experienced offensive line plus a burst of new talent. All of these lead to an improved team.

Of course, Patrick Mahomes is gone, but Nic Shimonek is a senior who has been in the program for three years now. He's brought the team closer than it's been in several years with his organizing of events outside of team sanctioned activities. He's also got some high praise of being compared to BJ Symons by both Kliff Kingsbury and Offensive coordinator Eric Morris.

Kingsbury demonstrated his growth by going and getting two new offensive coaches to improve the running game that was lackluster at best last season. Coaches Jabbar Juluke and Brandon Jones have been the focus of the off-season, revamping the running game and tweaking the blocking schemes for the explosive Red Raider offense.

The entire Big 12 seems improved and poised for a bounce back year after a down showing in 2016, but there's also a schedule that has benefited the Red Raiders in the past, getting other notoriously mediocre teams like TCU, Kansas State and Oklahoma State at home. And don't forget Iowa State, who you better believe is on the Red Raiders' radar after getting embarrassed in Ames, Iowa last season.

What do you think? Is the Texas Tech football team bound to mediocrity? Is a 7-5 season, after a 7-5 season with the occasional 10-win campaign, Texas Tech's destiny?

2017 Texas Tech Media Day Interviews