Texas Tech offensive coordinator David Yost immediately made waves after arriving in Lubbock with head coach Matt Wells. Yost has coached under some of the most intriguing offensive minds in the game, including the legendary Mike Leach and former Oregon coach Mark Helfrich. 

Yost sat down with Texas Football at the Lone Star Coaching Clinic in College Station for a Q+A session. We discussed a variety of topics, including how his diverse offensive influences helped shape his philosophy, the state of Alan Bowman heading into 2020 and whether his former QB protege Jordan Love can succeed at the next level. 

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Texas Football: You've worked with coaches from many different offensive backgrounds – how has that shaped your philosophy? 

David Yost: "What we do is kind of a little bit stealing from everybody. I was with Coach [Gary] Pinkel and the organization and how we do things and the belief that we've gotta be able to run the football, that comes from him. There are still some things in our offense that we did back at Missouri back in the day. When I went to Washington State with Coach [Mike] Leach, it was such a different way to look at the game. It helped me understand football better and a lot of what we do is still from the air raid ideas. When I was at Oregon, it was just seeing how they ran the football and how they did the tempo and how you do the tempo to be fast.

"When I left there, I had kind of taken notes everywhere and put everything together and thought if I'm a coordinator again, this is how I'm going to package stuff. Maybe didn't have the names of formations, but I knew we'd do it this way, knew we'd be an inside zone team, we're going to be a gap scheme, we're going to run four verticals, we're going to run Y-cross. When we don't go fast, we're going to do it this way. When we went to Utah State, I had a good pretty good plan for what we were going to do and how we were going to install it. I took stuff from Coach [Mark] Helfrich in the run game that Chip Kelly put in there. Coach Leach, how he coached quarterbacks and how he ran the whole offense and attacked. Coach Pinkel, 17 years with a guy, a lot of it rubs off. We're kind of a mesh of a lot of things. We're not truly just air raid, but we have definitely parts of that."

TF: How do you evaluate what the team accomplished in year one? 

DY: "We made some strides, but we left a lot of stuff on the field on both sides of the ball. We really look forward to year two and getting to go through all this stuff with these kids and show them how close we were on some things, but how what we did wasn't good enough. We've got to do more, we've got to find a way to do more and that's kind of been the challenge to them. Coach Wells said that working hard is the bare minimum. If that's your answer to what you're doing, well yeah, that's what everyone is doing. What are you doing above and beyond that? There's a lot to still get better at, but I think we're moving in the right direction."

TF: Even though he missed the 2019 season, do you still consider Alan Bowman the starter coming in? 

DY: "Oh yeah. Maverick's going to have the opportunity to compete with him, and really those are the two guys we'll have for this spring. It's going to give Alan the chance to run the team and Maverick the chance to get lots of reps. I'll probably try and get him in with the ones some because there's always competition and I want him to feel how that is, to be at the top of the depth chart and work with those guys. But he'll also be able to get lots of two reps and lots of three reps so we can kind of speed up his maturation because with him having the foot deal and missing part of the season, he kind of missed out on some of those reps. He did a great job of listening to us and being in on every meeting, but it's different than planning, so this will be a great spring for him."

TF: How involved is Matt Wells on offense? How does he normally split his time as a coach? 

DY: "He's probably closer to being the CEO of the program. He's very involved in all aspects of what we do. He'll come in and sit in on some of the offensive game planning meetings and some of the game plan stuff they do on defense. He spend a lot of time with Coach Tomerdahl on special teams, and I think he's kind of taken that as being one of his new charges and he does a great job with it. He really works hard on personnel in special teams. When the head coach is involved on special teams as much as he is, I think it adds a different level to the kids. He also adds a great job of kind of working the personnel so we can get more guys involved and more guys on the field so they can feel more involved. It just helps the care factor.

"But what we do on offense sort of comes from his philosophy and what he wanted to be when he called me three years ago and said, hey, are you interested in Utah State? I said, what do you want to be on offense? He said, I want to go fast, I want to be able to run the ball, we want to run it and I want to be able to take shots. i said okay, I'm all with that and this is how I envision it. It was different than what he'd kind of done before but he's been great at letting that kind of go, but he gets involved so he can know how and why we're doing it."

TF: Did you think Jordan Love could be a first round NFL quarterback when you started coaching him? 

DY: "Not right off the bat. He'd been there for about a year when I got there because he had graduated early and been on the scout team. When I got there in January, he competed in the spring and moved himself up to No. 2 and did a really good job putting pressure and made us think maybe he could be the guy in fall camp. Went into fall camp and was a little disappointed at the beginning, and then he kind of worked himself out of it. Maybe he was just trying to do too mcuh at the beginning. At the end of 2-of-days, it was back to being the No. 2 guy.

"As the season started, you could see it in practice, just getting the reps over and over and just doing the same things repeatedly. You could see this kind of growth and all of sudden he's gaining on Kent Myers. Then we give him a series, first week it doesn't really come out too much. We do it again, it doesn't come out much. We kind of keep doing that and it keeps growing and it just clicked. It was just kind of up from there. That second year it was like, here we go. He's a real talented kid. Someone in the NFL is gonna be real happy when they get him."