LUBBOCK, Texas — Joey McGuire walked out of the private jet terminal in Waco, Texas, sat down in his car and pulled out his phone.

His wife, Debbie, was at home on that Sunday in November 2021. Their children, Raegan and Garret, were living in New York City and Charlotte, respectively. So he dialed up a video call for his family.

He saw their smiling faces and paused, trying to find the words.

“Well, you’re looking at the next…”

“He didn’t even get it out,” Debbie said, “before we were all screaming like, ‘Oh my god!'”

Four years ago today this family’s dream came true ❤️ pic.twitter.com/qw44J5pEgs

— Raegan McGuire Tocco (@Raeganmcg) November 8, 2025

The next head coach of the Texas Tech Red Raiders had been a true underdog candidate at the start of the search process. To folks outside the Lone Star State, he was a relative unknown.

This wasn’t how these searches normally go. A longtime high school football coach with no college head coaching, coordinator or playcalling experience almost never gets to make the leap to the big job.

This particular candidate turned down a college head coaching opportunity in 2019 and spent the next two years living with regret, not knowing when he’d get another shot. But here’s the thing about McGuire, according to anyone who knows him well:

If you get Joey McGuire in the room, he’s going to get the job.

Texas Tech interviewed two sitting head coaches in Jeff Traylor and Sonny Dykes. Some powerful people wanted Mike Leach or Art Briles. Tech officials visited with prominent alumni and coordinators on the rise, including future Texas A&M coach Mike Elko.

But after one sit-down with the magnetic McGuire, the members of Texas Tech’s search committee were undeniably smitten.

“I’ll never forget when it ended and he walked out, we were all like, ‘We found our guy,'” former deputy AD Tony Hernandez said.

Four years and one month later, inside AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the McGuire clan was back together wiping away tears and confetti as they celebrated Texas Tech’s first-ever Big 12 championship.

As the Red Raiders prepare for the next biggest game in school history, a Capital One Orange Bowl CFP quarterfinal against No. 5 Oregon on New Year’s Day (12 p.m. ET, ESPN), McGuire continues to prove he was the perfect hire for fixing Texas Tech football.

“It’s absolutely crazy,” McGuire said. “We knew this was a good job, but who would imagine this?”

TEXAS TECH COULDN’T afford to get this hire wrong.

In the summer of 2021, the Red Raiders experienced an existential crisis. Texas and Oklahoma leaving the Big 12 put the league in peril, with serious fears about its financial and competitive future. Texas Tech leaders explored a move to the Pac-12 and were met with rejection. More rounds of realignment were imminent.

This was no time to be mediocre in football, and Texas Tech had the third-worst record in the Big 12 over the previous decade at 60-65.

Athletic director Kirby Hocutt and billionaire donor Cody Campbell had not been on good terms for more than a year. Campbell was not a fan of football coach Matt Wells and wasn’t shy about saying so. When Campbell was appointed to Texas Tech’s board of regents in the spring of 2021, he and Hocutt met and buried the hatchet.

“I said, ‘I’m not here to fire you. I’m here to work with you,'” Campbell said. “That’s my purpose, to make this place great. As long as that’s his goal too, we’re going to be just fine.”

“You’re always going to know where you stand with Cody,” Hocutt said. “He’s going to be very direct, which I appreciate. For Cody, it has always been about Texas Tech and it has all been about winning.”

Hocutt and Campbell rebuilt trust that summer while working closely together on realignment, NIL and stadium renovation plans. When it was time to pull the plug on the Wells era that fall, amid a 13-17 record in three years, Hocutt brought Campbell and fellow regent Dusty Womble into his search committee alongside Hernandez and football staffer Sammy Morris. It was a critical moment for Texas Tech to reset and achieve alignment with a hire that unified the fan base.

“We’ve got to get this right,” Hocutt said after firing Wells. “Bottom line, we have got to get this right.”

McGuire, a Baylor assistant at the time, was not at the top of the list when their work began on Oct. 25, 2021. The committee started with UTSA’s Jeff Traylor, arguably the hottest coaching candidate in the state. The Roadrunners were 8-0 and in the AP Top 25 for the first time in school history under their second-year coach. The East Texan possessed an appealing background for the Tech job as a respected former Texas high school football coach at Gilmer High School, where he won three state titles, who’d gained Power 5 experience working at Texas and Arkansas.

Texas Tech’s search committee sat down with Traylor in San Antonio soon after the job opened and were sold. But they made an unusual request: They wanted Traylor to get started immediately.

“For us, it was important that we didn’t lose a year,” Hocutt said. “We couldn’t lose a year of recruiting, couldn’t lose a year of letting your kids transfer out without an effort to keep them at Texas Tech. Timing was important.”

Had UTSA already lost a game or two, perhaps it would have changed everything. But the Roadrunners were undefeated and chasing a New Year’s Six bowl. Traylor couldn’t bring himself to bail on his players and ruin their season. He chose to lock in a 10-year deal to stay at UTSA, a decision that Campbell and Hocutt respected.

So Texas Tech officials sat down with SMU’s Sonny Dykes at his home in Dallas.

Dykes, the son of legendary Red Raiders coach Spike Dykes, had been passed up for the Tech job several times. In a tough bit of timing, he’d accepted the Cal job in 2012 just three days before Tommy Tuberville left Lubbock. When Dykes was at SMU for the 2021 season, the Mustangs had started 7-0, but an uncertain future in conference realignment made it tough to stay. TCU fired longtime coach Gary Patterson and the Horned Frogs job opened one week after Tech’s did. Dykes eventually chose the Horned Frogs.

What about Mike Leach? The winningest coach in Texas Tech history was winning once again at Mississippi State. Campbell believes Leach did have interest in coming back, but he said it was a “nonstarter” with some board members who still harbored hard feelings about Leach’s tenure.

“Leach was a little bit polarizing for the fan base,” Hernandez said. “Some people would’ve been completely on board and others wouldn’t have. It would’ve been a difficult hire that would not have unified the fan base, in my opinion.”

Texas Tech sources told ESPN that a few influential voices also wanted the school to seriously consider Art Briles, the former Baylor coach who’d been exiled from college football since 2015 following the school’s sexual assault scandal. Hernandez said they never contemplated meeting with Art or his son Kendal Briles.

Texas Tech interviewed two alums in USC offensive coordinator Graham Harrell and Detroit Lions offensive coordinator Anthony Lynn. The committee visited with Oklahoma defensive coordinator Alex Grinch. And the final candidate they met with during the search process was Mike Elko, the then-defensive coordinator at Texas A&M who, this season, led the Aggies to the College Football Playoff as head coach.

So why in the world did they go with McGuire?

TEXAS TECH’S SEARCH party sat down around a conference table at Waco’s private jet terminal. McGuire had hustled to secure this first meeting. He’d chosen to forgo formalities and cold-called Hocutt, leaving a voicemail and asking for an interview.

“He said, ‘Kirby, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t make this call. I need to be the next head football coach at Texas Tech,'” Hocutt recalled.

McGuire had called Traylor, a close friend with whom he shares an agent, to find out more about the committee. Then he’d called Campbell directly, too, to pitch himself. High school football coaches, Texas Tech alumni and even then-Carolina Panthers coach Matt Rhule kept calling to vouch for McGuire.

“I called Cody and said, ‘Hey listen, I’m telling you, I know there’s guys out there who are Red Raiders that could say they want this job more than me. They don’t. I’m just telling you,'” McGuire said.

McGuire had turned down the UTSA job late in the 2019 season, going against the advice of his agents and even Rhule. He was ready to be a head coach. But he believed Rhule might move on to the NFL after leading Baylor to the Big 12 title game in 2019. McGuire, Baylor’s associate head coach and defensive ends coach, hoped to be next in line as Bears coach.

McGuire asked Baylor AD Mack Rhoades the critical question: If he took the UTSA job and Rhule left, would he still get an interview at Baylor? Rhoades had previously worked with UTSA AD Lisa Campos and said he couldn’t do that to her. So McGuire bet on himself and lost. UTSA hired Traylor. And Rhoades went for a splashier hire with Dave Aranda, who had just won a national championship as DC at LSU. McGuire still remembers getting the call from Rhoades at 10:26 a.m.

“Let me tell you, man, I was about as low as low can get when I didn’t get Baylor,” he said. “That was really tough.”

McGuire feared he’d ruined his chance and might not get another. He talked with Lincoln Riley about a job at Oklahoma but ultimately agreed to stay in Waco under Aranda as associate head coach and outside linebackers coach. The 2020 season was rough in every way. The Bears went 2-7 in a COVID-shortened slate.

McGuire entered 2021 hoping he might get a shot at an in-state coaching job. When Texas Tech opened, he went full-court press. James Blanchard, the Baylor staffer who had become McGuire’s general manager at Texas Tech, was skeptical of McGuire’s chances.

“I was like, there’s no way. Why would they?” he said. “I thought he was going to have to go to North Texas or Texas State and prove himself first. I didn’t believe it was going to happen. I’d be lying if I said I did.”

McGuire had been coaching in college for only five years after his 14-year run as head coach at Cedar Hill High School, where he had won three state titles. McGuire wasn’t a coordinator. He wasn’t a playcaller. The lack of college experience would make any AD hesitant.

But no other candidate could match McGuire’s enthusiasm. His daughter, Raegan, went to Tech. So did his sister and two brothers-in-law. He had a best friend who played for Dykes and a nephew who played for Kliff Kingsbury. Even his dog, Charlie, was born in Lubbock.

McGuire believed all that history would help. One day after the search began, he told ESPN he was hopeful he would at least get an interview.

“You know what’s crazy? This is going to sound totally crazy, but my two friggin’ jobs that I love the most in the state are the one that I didn’t get [at Baylor] and Tech,” McGuire said at the time. “I think the reason I do is because it’s different. You’re going to do everything different at places like that, you know?”

When he finally got in the room with Texas Tech leadership, he had a seven-step plan for winning. He brought the full list of coaches he would like to hire. He had a detailed plan for fixing in-state recruiting and spoke of waking a sleeping giant. When he told them he would build the “toughest, hardest-working, most competitive team in the country,” Texas Tech president Lawrence Schovanec lit up and replied, “That is West Texas.”

“At the end of the day, you can put it on a whiteboard and do all the pros and cons,” Campbell said, “but it comes down to a subjective gut kind of decision. It was just clear that he was our guy.”

Hocutt and Hernandez flew back to Waco the following Sunday for one more meeting with McGuire and asked him to bring his wife. When Debbie exited her portion of the meeting, down a spiral staircase, she made sure to yell “WRECK EM!” on her way out. The AD loved that.

“Kirby and I like to joke that I was the closer,” Debbie said with a laugh.

McGuire got the job. Now he needed to make his most important hire.

THE PRIVATE JET was ready. McGuire was set to fly to Lubbock for his grand introduction. There was just one issue: Blanchard had gone missing.

“You’re fixin’ to make a billionaire late, bro!” McGuire told him over the phone.

The first hire of the McGuire era nearly fell through. After accepting the Texas Tech job, McGuire met with Aranda and said he wouldn’t take any coaches with him. He didn’t wish to disrupt a Baylor team that was 7-2 and chasing a Big 12 title. But he was bringing Blanchard, Baylor’s assistant AD for scouting, to lead his recruitment department.

“Aranda agrees, ‘OK, you can have him,'” Blanchard said. “And then he immediately calls me and says, ‘Hey, look, we’ll give you this if you stay. Don’t get on the plane with Joey.'”

Blanchard was genuinely torn. He was making $170,000 a year. McGuire had offered him $185,000. Now Aranda was offering to bump him up to $200,000. This was life-changing money to his family, and he went back and forth about staying or going.

Thirty minutes before he was set to fly out with McGuire, Blanchard still hadn’t decided. He called Rhule and asked what he would do.

“He’s like, ‘Man, I don’t know the answer to this for you. But whoever you believe would make sure your wife doesn’t lose the house if you die, go work for them,'” Blanchard said. “If I die tomorrow, and my wife can’t pay the bills, who would make sure my wife and kids keep the house?

“I was like, ‘F—, that’s Joey. I gotta go pack a bag.'”

Getting McGuire hired and on campus by Nov. 9 created some uncommon advantages. He and Blanchard had time to evaluate their roster over Tech’s final four games while interim coach Sonny Cumbie led the program. The new head coach held one-on-one meetings with every player in the program. He worked early mornings and late nights assembling his coaching staff and recruiting class.

“What was awesome is everybody in that building got to see the beautiful mind of James Blanchard,” McGuire said. “The dude is constantly on the phone. He never stops. We were in there recruiting our butts off.”

The fact that McGuire and Blanchard had to make every decision together from Day 1 established a powerful foundation that now has the Red Raiders in the hunt for the national championship. Blanchard enjoys more trust and autonomy in his recruiting operation than arguably any other GM in college football. It’s one of the biggest reasons why he hasn’t left.

Blanchard has turned down several high-profile GM opportunities in recent years and just inked a new three-year extension for $2.25 million. He now chuckles at how little money he was stressing over four years ago as he debated leaving Waco.

“Never saw all this coming,” Blanchard said. “I thought we were going to go compete for Big 12 championships, put kids in the NFL and see what happens. We were going to recruit top-25 classes and build it up to where, in Year 3 or 4, we’re competing for the Big 12 championship.

“It just became way bigger than that.”

TEXAS TECH INVESTED more than $25 million to build this year’s team. Their leadership never pretended that they didn’t.

They’ve been honest about their all-in shove for 2025 all along and unusually transparent about their spending. They saw opportunity and capitalized. But because they did, Texas Tech players believe their head coach isn’t getting enough credit for what he has accomplished this year.

“Coach McGuire, he’s different,” defensive end Romello Height said. “His energy is different. He’s why we are where we are right now. It’s not about money. It can be very dysfunctional if your team doesn’t have a bond.”

Texas Tech nailed its evaluations as it put together this loaded squad. The Red Raiders landed seven transfers who would become All-Big 12 performers and built arguably the top defensive line in the sport. The million-dollar free agents they bet on all paid off this season.

McGuire aced his coaching hires, too. First-year DC Shiel Wood is a Broyles Award finalist. New OC Mack Leftwich built the No. 2 scoring offense in FBS at 42.5 points per game. The duo came in this offseason with a combined two years of Power 4 coaching experience but proved to be perfect fits for taking the next big step as a program.

In 2025, though, winning isn’t just about good hires and recruits. Relationships and retention matter in this increasingly transactional era. Campbell believes McGuire’s high school mentality and genuine father-figure-type approach with players are invaluable ingredients in the Red Raiders’ rise.

“From Day 1, it was all about we can win because we’ve got good players, but that’s not why we’re going to win,” said special teams coordinator Kenny Perry, a fellow longtime high school coach. “We’re going to win because the culture’s right and that locker room is right.”

McGuire took on that assignment himself, confiding in Perry that he’d need to be more of a culture coach than ever to glue everything together. The process began with weekly breakfasts between blended groups of new and returning players in the offseason. Defensive tackle Lee Hunter said those meals helped him get to know his new brothers and learn their “why.” They built on those bonds over basketball, billiards, haircuts and hanging out at McGuire’s house.

“Love is our competitive advantage,” Rodriguez said. “How much we love each other, that’s how much harder we’re willing to play. We want it to show up every Saturday. These guys are flying around together. What’s in the water over there? It’s really just how much we care about each other.”

The right football coach, the guy everyone can get behind, helped create institutional alignment and momentum unlike anything Hocutt has experienced. From the board of regents to the chancellor and president to the AD to the major donors and stakeholders down to the coaches, they’ve never been this unified before.

“I think it doesn’t happen without Joey,” Hocutt said.

The state-of-the-art $242 million Womble Football Center and the substantial NIL war chest were proof enough, but they view this first playoff run as just the beginning. And from where McGuire’s sitting today, in his luxury corner office overlooking Jones AT&T Stadium, there’s not a better job in America.

Texas Tech rewarded McGuire with a new seven-year contract earlier this month worth more than $51.9 million, plus incentives. After the deal was done, he called Campbell to express his gratitude.

“You know, you didn’t even have to do this,” McGuire told him. “I’m never leaving.”