Texas Tech Is In The Final Four – Here’s Why I Hope They Lose

Texas Tech beat Gonzaga to win a spot in the 2019 NCAA Final Four. I hope they lose. Mind you, I don't really care who wins the championship, I just don't want a Texas team to win it.

Way back in the day, the year I was born, the Texas Western Miners under the steady hand of legendary coach Don Haskins, upset Kentucky on March 19, 1966, in the University of Maryland's Cole Field House. Coach Haskins started five black players. It was a shock to quite a few of the people in the venue, and a shock to many across the country. From ESPN:

"At the height of the civil-rights era, no major-college team had ever started five blacks in an NCAA championship game. In fact, until Texas Western coach Don Haskins did it earlier that season, no major-college team had ever started five blacks in ANY game."

In the subsequent 52 years, no other Texas team has done what Coach Haskins and his team did. Not UT Austin, not Texas Tech, no other Texas team, just little old Texas Western out here in the west Texas town of El Paso.

Put that in your Tex-Mex taco and eat it, the rest of Texas.

So now we have to watch and see if Texas Tech can knock Texas Western off the throne it has held for 52 years. Will they win? Eh, even if they do, they'll never have a run like Coach Haskins and his team. They'll never be the first Texas team to win an NCAA Men's Basketball Championship. They'll never be the ONLY Texas team to hold that distinction for 52 years. They'll never have the love and admiration of an entire city the way El Paso loves our 1966 Texas Western Miners.

And they'll never have the honor of having the legendary Coach Haskins at the helm for so many years.

Texas Tech is in the Final Four. Good for them.