Caprock Chronicles: Texas Tech’s inaugural football season, 1925
Editor’s Note: Jack Becker is the editor of Caprock Chronicles and can be reached at jack.becker@ttu.edu. Today’s article is a repeat of David J. Murrah’s Sept. 24, 2016, Caprock Chronicle article. This article is part of the ongoing celebration of Tech’s 100th year anniversary.
At long last, in 1925, college football finally made it to Lubbock. On Oct. 3 of that year, Texas Tech’s Matadors kicked off the first-ever college game in Lubbock against the McMurry College Indians from Abilene.
It wasn’t the first college game on the South Plains; that honor went to Clarendon College when it defeated the nearby Goodnight Academy 16–10 on December 5, 1903. However, the schools were only junior colleges.
Senior college football came a little later. By 1925, nearby West Texas State College at Canyon had been playing football for fifteen years, although most of its opponents had been high school teams or the scattered little church junior colleges — Goodnight Baptist College at Goodnight, Wayland Baptist and Seth Ward at Plainview, Hereford Christian at Hereford and Simmons College in Abilene. WT’s first game in 1910 was a 36–0 victory over Amarillo High School.
As soon as Texas Tech was created and Lubbock announced as its location, the school’s fielding a football team was one of the community’s highest priorities. Long before the college opened, Lubbock supporters had formed a booster club, now the Red Raider Club. It wanted big-time football. However, for its inaugural season, Tech had to schedule anyone who would play, and the college chose opponents which were closest to Lubbock. Its inaugural game was scheduled to be against a small fledgling Methodist school in Abilene, McMurry College.
In 1925, McMurry College was beginning its third season of football. Its 1924 team went 4-1, its only loss to Sul Ross State. And, in 1925, McMurry got an early start on the season before the big game with Tech. The Indians had already played two games, going 1-1 against Daniel Baker College from Brownwood and Meridian Junior College. Meanwhile, by the time of the McMurry game, Tech’s Matadors, had only practiced for two weeks. A total of 137 players had showed up for Tech’s first workout.
Nonetheless, the Tech-McMurry game was big-time college football for the five thousand or more fans attending the game at the South Plains Fair Grounds. Agriculture professor W.L. Stangel led a crew of students trying to sweep goat head stickers from the field. On the opposite side, a tall, lanky McMurry teacher cheering on his team caught the eye of a Lubbock newspaper reporter.
"W.C. Holden, head of the History Department at McMurry College, is not a football star, but is effective on the sideline and knows every member of the Indian aggregation by name,” the Lubbock Avalanche noted, and “members of that team will readily confess that he was right in there from the start and carried a big part of the Load.”
Within four years, Holden would be teaching at Tech, and both he and Stangel would have major impacts on the school. Today, two buildings on the campus bear their names: Holden Hall and Stangel Hall.
The opening game was nothing like the air-raid offense played by Tech today. Neither team had scored as time was running out. Tech kicked a 20-yard field goal, but the referee ruled that time had expired just before the kick. Thus, Tech’s football history began with a scoreless tie.
The team made up for its lack of offense later in the season. Tech defeated Wayland Baptist 120–0, its highest point total ever. Even today’s air-raid offenses will probably not exceed that total.
There were other memorable highlights in 1925. Tech scored its first points, a field goal, in a 3–3 tie with Austin College and made its first touchdown against Montezuma College in its first ever win, 30–0. In its first games against traditional West Texas football powers, Tech beat Sul Ross State in Alpine 21–7 but then lost to Howard Payne College in Brownwood, 30–0. Thus, it finished the season at a respectable 6-1-2, especially after winning its long-anticipated game with West Texas State, 13–12.
Embedded in that first season were the hopes of future success. In Tech’s second game in 1925, the 3–3 tie with Austin College, Lubbock’s fans were introduced to Pete Cawthon, the 27-year-old fiery young coach of the Kangaroos. Five years later, Cawthon became Tech’s third head coach, and during his 11-year tenure from 1930 to 1940, his teams went 78-32-6, winning more games than any other Tech coach.
During that time, the Matadors became the nationally known Red Raiders, the highest-scoring team in the country. They made back-to-back bowl games (Sun and Cotton) in 1937 and 1938, going undefeated during the 1938 regular season, the only team in Tech’s history to do so. And it all began in that banner year of 1925.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Caprock Chronicles: Texas Tech’s inaugural football season, 1925
