Carlson: Texas Tech's Joey McGuire is well-schooled to go up against 'the godfather'
Jenni CarlsonOklahoman
STILLWATER ― Joey McGuire knows exactly who he’ll be matching wits against Saturday.
“The godfather,” McGuire said.
He chuckled.
“He’s basically the godfather.”
The Texas Tech football coach was referring to his Oklahoma State counterpart, Mike Gundy, who is in his 18th season with the Cowboys. He’s the longest tenured coach at any Big 12 school, and it’s really not all that close.
His closest competition: Iowa State’s Matt Campbell, in his seventh season with the Cyclones.
McGuire is at the bottom of the conference’s longevity rankings, in just his first season with the Red Raiders. But while he shares that first-year distinction with OU’s Brent Venables and TCU’s Sonny Dykes, McGuire might need an asterisk by his name.
He only entered the college coaching ranks five years ago.
For the first 22 years of his career, he was a high school coach in Texas. He was still coaching Cedar Hill High School in the Dallas suburbs in 2016.
The last time Gundy had anything to do with high school football, he was in high school. That was all the way back in 1985 when he was a senior quarterback at Midwest City. He’s been coaching in the college ranks since 1990.
Despite the difference in his path, McGuire doesn’t see his largely high school coaching background as a negative.
Quite the opposite.
The question of how he would be successful as a college head coach surfaced when he was interviewing with Texas Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt. McGuire, who had been an assistant at Baylor for four years, was ready with his answer.
“Kirby, no disrespect to you or any other AD in the country,” McGuire remembers saying, “but at Cedar Hill, I was in charge of (football at) two middle schools, I was in charge of a freshman campus, and I was in charge of a high school campus. I had 32 full-time coaches on my staff, and whenever you count up all of those teams and all of those male athletes, I was in charge of more male athletes than what most ADs are with all other sports combined.”
Hocutt believed McGuire could do the job, and early returns on McGuire are good. The Red Raiders come to Stillwater on Saturday afternoon with a 3-2 record, including a pair of overtime wins. The second came against the hated Texas Longhorns and set off a wild celebration in Lubbock.
But even before games started, McGuire was winning. Texas Tech has raised upwards of $100 million for athletics since McGuire arrived in Lubbock, and a significant chunk of that is going towards a $200 million football facilities project.
“I always tell everybody I’m kind of the unicorn of coaching ― I’ve only been four places,” he said of his stops during an almost three-decade career. “I get somewhere, and I’m happy, and I want to build where I’m at.”
So, why is Texas Tech the place for McGuire?
He says he got interest from college programs for nearly a decade before he jumped from high school coaching. While he wanted to be a college coach, he repeatedly opted to stay at Cedar Hill.
“It was a place that we got turned around,” he said, referencing the perennial losing records Cedar Hill had prior to his arrival. “Winning was important. We had a great culture. I was working for an incredible athletic director.
“We had everything going in the right direction.”
McGuire also wanted a little more time coaching his kids, Reagan and Garret.
“I coached my daughter in powerlifting … and then coached my son in everything that he played,” McGuire said. “I’m only gonna get one chance at this.”
Coaches all around college football, however, knew McGuire might be ready to move as soon as Garret played his final high school game in 2016. When that happened, calls started quickly. Texas. Arkansas. Kansas. Arizona State. Baylor.
Matt Rhule had just taken over the Bears when he called McGuire.
“Can you interview Friday?” McGuire remembers Rhule asking.
“Coach, man, I am very interested,” McGuire said. “I would love to. I hear great things about you, but I am crossing the Red River to go watch my buddy play in the state championship game.”
That buddy: Dave Martin, longtime head coach at Jones High School.
Martin coached the secondary for McGuire at Cedar Hill in 2003 before taking another coaching job in Oklahoma, Martin’s home state. But McGuire and Martin remained close and had a standing agreement.
“Whoever got beat out of the playoffs first,” McGuire said, “had to cross the Red River.”
Rhule agreed to meet McGuire a few days after he watched Martin and Jones win the Class 3A state title, Rhule offered him a job coaching tight ends at Baylor, and five years later, McGuire is the head coach at Texas Tech.
(Martin, by the way, is his director of player development.)
McGuire’s path is not conventional.
But unconventional doesn’t mean bad.
“I think there’s some advantages to it,” Gundy said. “I think that they have advantages in recruiting based on, they can communicate with the high school coaches, and I think at times, high school coaches can say, ‘Hey, you’ve been here.’
“But I know that in the end, football is football.”
Same goes for being the head coach of a big program.
“I’m guessing in high school, you deal with the principal, you deal with the school board, you deal with the superintendent,” Gundy said, “and I deal with the athletic director, the president and the board of regents.”
McGuire knows many in the sports world probably still see him as a high school coach who gets to coach college football, but he doesn’t shy away from his experience. He embraces the road he traveled.
“The biggest difference is the magnitude of the alumni and fan base,” he said. “The people that you’re representing, it’s just so much larger, and that feeling has surprised me a little bit.”
The passion of Red Raider fans, however, has McGuire considering what is possible in Lubbock. Maybe he can stay at Texas Tech as long as Gundy has been at OSU. Perhaps the Red Raiders can become a perennial contender for Big 12 titles like the Cowboys.
McGuire was on the Baylor sideline last season when the Bears upset the Cowboys in Arlington.
“If OSU wins that game, they’re playing in the playoff, and I don’t see that you can’t do that here,” McGuire said, adding that Texas Tech’s future facilities plans will be transformative.
“There’s not going to be excuses. There’s not gonna be like, ‘Well, we don’t have the facilities’ or ‘We don’t have the backing.’
“There’s no excuses not to win at Texas Tech.”
