This is Tahj Brooks' Texas Tech football team until further notice | Giese
The worst kept secret in Lubbock over the last month is that Tahj Brooks needs the football.
In fact, the Texas Tech football team needs Brooks to have the ball. It just took a few weeks for that reality to set in.
The Red Raiders are known for the air-it-out, sling-it-around offenses of the Mike Leach and Kliff Kingsbury eras. It produced some of the most prosperous years in program history and made that Patrick Mahomes II fella a pretty good quarterback both at Tech and now with the Kansas City Chiefs.
Those offenses are fun, but the last decade or so from the Red Raiders has shown it doesn't always lead to on-field success. Passing's great. Get the ball out and up and down the field you go, at least in theory.
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Lost in that sort of mentality is that running backs are people, too.
Tech head coach Joey McGuire and assistant Kenny Perry have gloated about Brooks' ability to pass block, a needed skill for backs in pass-heavy schemes. And Brooks is good at it. He's strong and sturdy, unafraid to take and make contact with backers and backs and big guys.
But Brooks wants the ball. Fans wanted him to have it far more against Wyoming and Oregon and didn't receive their wish.
It's been a much different story over the last month. In Saturday's 39-14 win over Baylor, Texas Tech opened the game with an 11-play drive that featured seven running plays — five to Brooks. He totaled 88 yards on the ground compared to Baylor's 85 total yards of offense at one point.
When the dust settled and Tech picked up its first road win of the year, Brooks had 170 yards on 31 carries. It was his fourth-straight game over 100 yards — the first Red Raider to do so since Ricky Williams in the 1990s.
Brooks is doing something no Tech fan has seen in decades, and it's because of skill and necessity. At 5-foot-10, Brooks is hard to take down. He's patient — sometimes to a fault — with a quick burst and shoulders like cinder blocks. He is the Texas Tech offense, and it's made a world of difference.
Against the Bears, Brooks set single-game career highs in yards and rushes. He also sits at 693 yards for the season, a new career high and we've just reached the halfway point of the year.
More: Was another Tahj Brooks 100-yard game worth an A? | Texas Tech football report card
His ability to lead the offense also opened up the passing game in spots, evidenced by the play-action fake to him by Behren Morton that left Baylor Cupp wide open for an 18-yard touchdown.
Feeding Brooks hasn't just been successful. It also takes pressure off Morton and the passing game to do all the work. The offensive line has started to show why coaches were glorifying them throughout the month of August and Brooks is the beneficiary of their resurgence.
The last running back to reach 1,000 yards for a season was DeAndre Washington, who totaled 1,492 yards in 2015. Brooks is well on his way to reaching quadruple digits, and should be getting more and more opportunities until he taps out.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: This is Tahj Brooks' Texas Tech football team until further notice | Giese
