Texas Tech won too much football in 2025, and now nobody in America wants to play them, the exact fate reserved for kids who show up to the cafeteria with a lunch nicer than everyone else’s. Joey McGuire’s team went 12-2, beat BYU for the Big 12 championship, and reached the College Football Playoff before Oregon ended the run in the Orange Bowl quarterfinal. The reward: Texas A&M, USC, NC State, and Mississippi State have each declined or canceled future non-conference games against the Red Raiders, and McGuire says everyone he’s approached has said no.
In his fifth season at Texas Tech, McGuire has decided to enjoy the isolation. “We’re the most hated team in college football,” he told Brett McMurphy. “And I absolutely love it.” That’s the posture of a coach who prefers fear to an invitation, but underneath it sits a confession nobody in the sport wants to make out loud: nothing Texas Tech did broke a rule. NIL spending is legal; recruiting on an open checkbook is legal; winning a conference with money you were allowed to spend is, by definition, allowed. The scheduling freeze-out nobody will admit is punishment is really the only enforcement tool left for a hierarchy the sport can’t defend on paper.
The receipts explain the resentment well enough. Texas Tech’s 2025 roster cost north of $28 million to assemble, second nationally in NIL spending behind only Texas itself. Texas Tech spent its way into everyone’s bad graces the way a lottery winner spends his way into family feuds; the money isn’t illegal, it just gives everyone around him a theory about how it should have been divided instead.
Cincinnati might disagree that Texas Tech broke no rules. Quarterback Brendan Sorsby transferred to Lubbock on a reported $4-6 million NIL package without throwing a pass for the program, Cincinnati is suing him for a $1 million buyout, and its coach has accused Texas Tech of tampering. The Brendan Sorsby situation didn’t help the case that any of this was clean, and it fits the same pattern that turned Tennessee’s own NIL disaster into a cautionary tale: a roster built fast enough on money alone starts generating enemies faster than it generates wins.
Give the freeze-out its due complexity before assigning motive to all four programs equally. Mississippi State’s cancellation, which would have opened in Starkville in 2028, traces back to the SEC’s move to a nine-game conference schedule starting in 2026, a structural change that was going to squeeze somebody’s non-conference slate regardless of who Texas Tech had become. That’s a real scheduling problem, not a grudge.
Texas A&M, USC, and NC State don’t have that excuse. None of the three cited a conference realignment, a stadium renovation, or a scheduling conflict; they simply declined, three separate programs arriving at the same unspoken conclusion without needing to compare notes. “We’re talking to everybody and anybody,” McGuire said. “So far, everybody’s told us no.” A program can’t be penalized for winning within rules everyone agreed to, so the sport found a workaround that requires no vote, no committee, and no name attached to the decision.
McMurphy’s report on the freeze-out is where the “most hated” quote first surfaced, worth reading in full.
https://twitter.com/On3/status/2086832880676716740
McGuire, to his credit, isn’t hiding from any of it. He’s said he’d welcome a Notre Dame home-and-home if Texas ever cancels its own series with the Irish, and that he’s already talked to Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman about it, the scheduling equivalent of a kid iced out of one lunch table quietly building a nicer one across the room. Whether Freeman bites is its own question; the instinct to answer rejection by finding someone even less afraid of the price tag fits this version of Texas Tech.
Being called the most hated team in college football is supposed to sting. Texas Tech has instead turned it into a recruiting pitch, which is either the most self-aware branding exercise in the sport or the only move left for a program nobody will schedule and everybody will watch anyway. The rest of our college football coverage has plenty on how the neighborhood is handling everyone else’s new money. The Red Raiders aren’t apologizing, and at this point, why would they.
