Upheaval not an excuse

HOUSTON — Senior Texas Tech quarterback Seth Doege has seen this before.

The Red Raiders head into Friday’s Meineke Car Care Bowl against Minnesota after some serious upheaval with head coach Tommy Tuberville abruptly leaving the team for the job in Cincinnati. Doege remembers how the team came together for a win in the Alamo Bowl under an interim coach just days after head coach Mike Leach was fired in the 2009 season.

The Red Raiders have hired Kliff Kingsbury to replace Tuberville, but interim head coach Chris Thomsen will lead Texas Tech against the Golden Gophers.

”It’s settled now, and the young guys are excited. I remember… when I was younger how close we became as a football team,” Doege said. ”Because with all the uncertainty, all the distractions, that’s what gets you through it.”

Thomsen, who coached the offensive line before becoming the interim head coach, said he believes his team has dealt with the changes and is ready to move forward.

”It’s really just business as usual for us,” Thomsen said. ”The great thing about this team, the staple of this team, has been leadership all year, and we define leadership as guys who come out every single day focused and do it. If you can do that, you can lead as a freshman, sophomore, senior; it doesn’t matter. And that’s really the way they’ve approached it.”

Minnesota head coach Jerry Kill doesn’t expect any drop off for the Red Raiders with Tuberville’s departure.

”I don’t think a whole lot is going to change with them,” Kill said. ”Their system, offensively all the way back to coach Leach, has stayed the same, pretty much… they’ve got good football players, a good system and I know they’ll be prepared to play.”

Texas Tech returns to a bowl game after seeing an 18-year bowl streak snapped with last season’s disappointing 5-7 finish. This is its fourth consecutive bowl game in Texas and its eighth since 2000. The Red Raiders have won their past two bowl games.

The Gophers are in a bowl for the first time since 2009 and looking for their first bowl win since 2004. They won six games this season, which is the same number of games they won in the previous two seasons combined.

”We’re in the building blocks of a program right now,” Kill said. ”There’s no question that getting a bowl victory gives you great momentum going into the offseason. We won our last game of the year last year, and I feel like it took some momentum into the offseason. I think getting a bowl win would be certainly special for this group of kids, and certainly our seniors that have been through so much.”

A win on Friday would give Minnesota a winning record for the first time since going 7-6 in 2008.

To do that it’ll have to figure out how to slow down Texas Tech’s passing attack. Doege is fourth in the nation in yards passing with 3,934 and his 38 touchdown passes are second in the country. He needs just 66 yards to join Graham Harrell as the only players in school history to throw for 4,000 yards in consecutive seasons.

He’ll face a Minnesota defense that is 11th in the nation against the pass, allowing 178.5 yards a game. The Gophers have allowed just one 300-yard passer this season. Doege has nine games with more than 300 yards passing this season, and two for more than 400, including a season high of 499 against West Virginia.

”I don’t think we have to do anything a lot different, and they’re not going to do anything different,” Kill said. ”And I think that the style gives us an opportunity to try to keep their offense off the field, but we have to stay on the field. We didn’t do a real good job of that over the last two ball games.”

Texas Tech tight end Jace Amaro, who was injured Oct. 13 and hasn’t played since because of internal bleeding, returned to practice this week and expects to play Friday. He said he wants to help the seniors go out with a victory.

”We have a lot of personal emotion going into this game,” Amaro said. ”Even though a lot of people think we’re distracted, I think this just made us a lot more focused on this game for these seniors.”