In any sport, the goal of a team is to win some kind of championship. College sports is a bit unique in that multiple teams can call themselves champions simply by winning a conference title.
For some programs, winning the league championship is just a stepping stone to a bigger goal, but for a program like Texas Tech, winning the conference championship is something to celebrate because the program doesn't accomplish that feat all that often.
Tech has only won a total of 11 conference titles in nearly 100 years of football history, but nine of those came in the now-defunct Border Conference, where Tech was in the same league as teams like Arizona, Arizona State, UTEP, West Texas A&M, New Mexico, New Mexico State, Northern Arizona and Hardin-Simmons at the time, meaning winning that league was no big feat.
In 1957, Texas Tech left the Border Conference and joined the Southwest Conference. This made the team much more competitive, and as a result, league titles became rare in Lubbock. In fact, Tech has never won the SWC. The Red Raiders were co-champions in both 1976 and 1994.
So this year marks the 30th anniversary of Tech's last conference title. (The closest the Red Raiders came to winning the Big 12 Conference was in 2008, when they shared the South Division title with Oklahoma and Texas.) So let's take a look back at the last time the Red Raiders won a conference championship. What was it like in 1994?
1994 was a strange season for the SWC, as the team with the best record in the conference (6-0-1) was actually Texas A&M, but the Aggies were on probation and ineligible to win the conference championship.
The five schools behind them (Tech, Texas, TCU, Rice, and Baylor) all had 4-3 records in league play, so there was a five-school tie for the SWC championship.At a time when there were no conference title games, the honor of playing in the Cotton Bowl went to the team with the longest absence from the prestigious event, Texas Tech, who hadn't played in the Cotton Bowl since 1938.
That year, the Red Raiders finished the regular season with a 6-5 record, but a lot of that was down to a tough non-conference schedule that saw Spike Dykes' squad host No. 1 Nebraska at home and take on No. 21 Oklahoma.
Of course, things didn't go well in the 1995 Cotton Bowl as Zach Thomas and his teammates ran into a ferocious attack from No. 21 USC, featuring the nation's best wide receiver in Keyshawn Johnson. The most memorable moment for Texas Tech fans in the 55-14 loss came during the opening kickoff, when the field was covered in tortillas and the game had to be briefly stopped for cleanup.
In 1994, the second year of President Bill Clinton's administration, the so-called “dot-com” bubble was fueling the economy and the Internet was becoming more widespread, but prices of goods were still significantly lower than they are today.
For example, a dozen fresh eggs cost just $0.86. Similarly, a half gallon of milk cost just $1.44. And a gallon of gasoline cost just $1.11.
In fact, the biggest sports story of all was figure skating, when American skater Nancy Kerrigan was assaulted at the US Olympic Trials ahead of the 1994 Winter Olympics in what was soon discovered to be part of a plot orchestrated by rival skater Tonya Harding.
Another big news was the first time that the FIFA World Cup was held in the United States. Although the United States exceeded expectations, Brazil ended up winning that year.
The biggest news story in the country, and indeed the world, that year was the arrest of former NFL running back O.J. Simpson. Charged with the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, Simpson was involved in a televised, slow-speed chase with Los Angeles police while driving down an interstate in the backseat of a white Ford Bronco.
Another big news story in the sports world was the 1994 baseball strike, which saw the first ever cancellation of the World Series due to a labor dispute between the players' union and owners.
A lot was happening outside of the sports world too: Netscape, for example, launched “Navigator,” the first commercially successful Internet browser.
1994 was a big year for gamers with the release of Sony's “PlayStation” gaming console, which revolutionized the video game industry.
Movies that made waves at the box office included “The Lion King,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Forrest Gump,” and “Pulp Fiction.” On television, a new sitcom called “Friends” debuted and became a huge hit across the nation.
In the music world, the suicide of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain shook the world, while “Woodstock 1994” attempted to recreate the magic of the original 1969 Woodstock music festival.
On the darker side of the culture, convicted serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered while serving his sentence in Wisconsin; he was convicted in 1991.
Meanwhile, Amazon, which will become the world's largest company in 2024, was founded in 1994. Also, in April of that year, South Africa held its first free elections in which people of all races could vote.
As you can see, 1994 was a fascinating year, culminating in a football conference title for Texas Tech University, and 30 years later this fall, here's hoping history repeats itself, at least when it comes to the Red Raiders.
