DALLAS -- Texas Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt didn’t expect to be home for the holidays. That wasn’t the plan.
The plan was always to see Texas Tech play Duke at Madison Square Garden, and then focus on the bowl game after Christmas. But after a five-game losing streak to end the season – and Kliff Kingsbury’s tenure at Texas Tech – a bowl game never came.
Instead, Hocutt sat on his couch on Dec. 15 and flipped on the first bowl game of bowl season.
The New Mexico Bowl featured two of the better Group of Five teams in America, as nine-win North Texas faced off against 10-win Utah State. Both came within inches of winning their conferences. It seemed like a perfect way to open bowl season.
When the opening whistle sounded, it became clear that Utah State – even without its head coach – was on another level. The Aggies physically dominated the Mean Green, a team that blew out SEC opponent Arkansas earlier in the year.
Utah State scored a touchdown on the third play of the game. It forced three interceptions and five punts in the first half alone. The Aggies scored 24 unanswered points during a dominant second quarter, and knocked UNT quarterback Mason Fine out of the game after crushing the Mean Green front.
In the midst of the dominant second quarter, Hocutt was impressed. He picked up the phone and dialed the number of one of his newest hires, a man who agreed to move 1,000 miles and lead the Texas Tech football program barely two weeks earlier.
“I want some of that.”
But while Wells is relatively anonymous among national college football fans, he’s been a favorite of those in the profession for years. When Tech hired him, he received glowing endorsements from Bob Stoops, Mack Brown and Wes Welker.
It took four games as head coach at Utah State for him to get Hocutt’s attention.
Four games into his head coaching tenure at Utah State in 2013, Wells faced off against Lane Kiffin’s USC team. The Trojans were one of the most talented teams in America, with future NFL players like Cody Kessler, Marquise Lee and Nelson Agholor on offense.
But even though the Aggies seemed to be severely overmatched, the battle at the Coliseum turned into a dogfight. Utah State held the highly-touted offense to just 164 passing yards and 3.0 yards per carry.
USC escaped with a 17-14 victory. Even so, USC linebacker coach Mike Ekeler couldn’t shake the game from his mind.
Ekeler called his friend, Hocutt, after the game. Hocutt had just hired Kingsbury to lead Texas Tech months earlier and the Red Raiders were off to a quick 4-0 start. Kingsbury was signed to a lengthy extension months later, and Hocutt had no plans to hold a coaching search for many more years.
Nevertheless, Ekeler had to tell Hocutt about what just happened against a Mountain West opponent.
“Hey, you need to keep an eye on this head coach,” Ekeler told Hocutt.
Even with all the talent in the world, Ekeler saw the USC staff struggle to plan for a Utah State squad that was schematically difficult. The Trojans struggled to deal with the physicality that Utah State instilled in its program. It didn’t hurt that Wells had a heck of a defensive coordinator by his side that year: Todd Orlando.
“[Ekeler] felt lucky to beat them,” Hocutt said. “And this is USC playing Utah State!”