Lubbock, Revisited: The Road Trip Starts With a Payback
Cleveland State34
Texas Tech20
- Game
- 2026 Week 6
- Date
- 2026-10-17
- Site
- Away
- Result
- Win
- Record
- 5-1
Remember Lubbock in 2024? The 17-13 loss, the jet-engine crowd, the pretzel from Marisol the bus driver? Well, friends, we went back.
Vikings 34, Texas Tech 20. On the road. Fourteen points of daylight in a building that once made me eat a salad. The road trip is off to a beautiful start. Five and one.
My Lakers had a bye this weekend, so I spent Saturday morning at the Reyeses’ teaching Leo how to throw a spiral with a ball that’s bigger than his head. He’s eight. He threw it into the hedge four times and then, on the fifth try, he threw a perfect little wobbling spiral right into my chest. Marco and Jess screamed like he’d been drafted. Sofia, who’s six, said, “I could do that,” picked up the ball and threw it into the hedge. Then she said, “On purpose.”
That’s this team, folks. You throw it into the hedge a few times, you keep throwing, and eventually it lands right where you meant it to.
Four pierogi. One goes to the hedge, which has earned it.
The Vikings went back to Lubbock, the site of one of the most frustrating losses of the Dolan era, and won by two touchdowns. I could make a speech about growth. I won’t, because Marlene has asked me to “keep the speeches under one per season” and I want to save mine for when it counts.
What I’ll say: fourteen-point road wins in hostile Big 12 buildings are how you know the floor of a program has risen. In 2024 this game was a four-point loss. In 2026 it’s a fourteen-point win. That’s eighteen points of progress in two years, measured in the same stadium. That’s a real number.
One road game down, four to go. Next stop: Oxford, where Nadia’s bobblehead “remembers.” I’ve asked the Doom Model to run the Miami (OH) game. It returned the word “points” and nothing else.
“Lil,” for the reader in Strongsville who sends a postcard every week: a hospital bracelet error at my birth. They wrote “Lil Ken” instead of “Baby Ken.” My mother kept it. We don’t talk about it.
Back and forth
Payback in Lubbock, Kenny!
Eighteen points of progress in two years. I did the math on a napkin.
Leo threw a spiral!
Into your chest. After four into a hedge. That’s the most Viking thing I’ve ever heard.
Lubbock repaid with interest, a spiral out of the hedge, and a Doom Model that has started answering in single words.
Split Decision is fiction. Mickey Bridges, Ken Hogmanes and The Lakefront Ledger are invented; the games and scores are not.