LUBBOCK — Once a week, usually Sunday, Texas Tech football coach Joey McGuire forgoes his white pickup and makes the 10-mile drive from his Lakeridge Estates home to campus in something more, well, Joey.
He calls it the Batmobile. It’s a black 2021 Corvette Stingray, a surprise 50th birthday gift from his wife, Debbie. Joey says the car purportedly can reach 196 mph, which begs the obvious follow-up.
Dare we ask, Coach, the fastest you’ve gone?
“I haven’t gotten close to that,” McGuire said. “But I’ve gone pretty fast.”
Midlife crisis? Oh, the contrary. After 21 high school seasons with three state titles at Cedar Hill, then five years as a Baylor assistant, he’s attained his mountaintop. OK, so the most suitable view was from atop a 220-foot crane, with McGuire showing Guns Up and bellowing from the summit: “It’s incredible!”
Regardless of vantage point, his aspirations and gusto for Texas Tech are boundless. Like his Batmobile and crane climb, his 8-5 debut last season was a head-turner.
McGuire became the first Red Raider football coach to beat Texas and Oklahoma in the same year, memorably shouting in the locker room after the 37-34 win over the Longhorns, “The country’s gonna find out: ‘Everything runs through Lubbock!’ ”
Tech led the nation in fourth-down gambles (52) and conversions (33) and beat Ole Miss in the Texas Bowl. Then McGuire reeled in the Red Raiders’ highest-ranked recruiting class since 2011.
Bolstered with such results, Joey fever has proved contagious among Red Raiders fans and within Tech’s locker room.
“It’s literally crazy what’s about to happen around here,” Tech defensive back Dadrion “Rabbit” Taylor-Demerson said.
Meaning what?
“Hey, man, this place is about to be booming. This might be the new Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, those schools. It’s about to be booming in West Texas.”
McGuire naturally isn’t tapping the brakes on expectations. He says he appreciates fans who keep thanking him for that UT-OU sweep, but . . .
“Our goal is to win the Big 12. We didn’t do that.”
Winning the Big 12 would be historic for a program whose only titles in the last 67 years are co-championships in the old Southwest Conference in 1976 and 1994. A title this season probably would require beating the Longhorns or Sooners or both in those teams’ final year in the Big 12, a provocative subplot of which the Red Raiders are well aware.
“If you ask any of our kids, they’re gonna tell you this: ‘We’ll win the Big 12 before Texas leaves the Big 12,’” McGuire said. “So, obviously, our plan is to win it this year.”
As he spoke to The News in his office on June 20, McGuire was amid a whirlwind recruiting month and in full throttle despite sleeping five hours the previous weekend.
A day earlier, The News was the only media outlet present when McGuire climbed one of two construction cranes towering above the south end of Jones AT&T Stadium in what amounted to a publicity stunt as Tech raises funds for its $219 million, well-underway stadium and football facility upgrades.
And in May we were at Joe T. Garcia’s, the Fort Worth stop of the statewide Red Raider Club Wreck ‘Em Tour, where McGuire stoked the crowd with proclamations like, “We signed the fastest class in the nation,” and this challenge to likely top-10 Oregon when it visits Lubbock on Sept. 9: “What I want to find out is, ‘Can they handle 60 minutes of us?’”
He is caffeine personified, perhaps partly because, as Taylor-Demerson says, “he drinks so much freakin’ coffee.”
McGuire’s evangelistic zeal evokes memories of one of his role models, the “Unbelievable!” Jim Wacker during his 1980s TCU prime. It’s natural to wonder, though: Is McGuire always like this?
“He is,” said Debbie, his wife of 29 years, feigning a sigh. “Joey has the mentality that when his feet hit the floor he’s going to be in a good mood.
“It’s very annoying.”
Uncle Joe-Joe
For four June weekends, the McGuires’ 8,500-square-foot home doubled as Tech’s recruiting hub, entertaining successive waves of 12-to-14 prospective Red Raiders, their families and current Tech players.
As was the case during Joey’s 14 seasons as Cedar Hill’s head coach (2003-2016), Debbie co-pilots many off-the-field aspects of the Red Raider program, including recruiting.
Football staff members say that during the McGuires’ 20-month tenure, a familial culture has been fostered. Six daughters of former Tech players and coaches work in the football department. Staffers’ younger children greet the McGuires as Uncle Joe-Joe and Aunt Debbie.
No surprise, then, that the McGuires ordered a food truck for recruiting weekends and transformed their home into a six-bedroom, six-bath, three-fireplace welcome wagon. Recruits played basketball and cornhole but, inevitably, gravitated to the Batmobile.
“They all, always, want to see it,” McGuire said.
Tech senior quarterback Tyler Shough, who last season overcame a shoulder injury to go 5-0 as the starter, says Joey McGuire makes sincere personal connections with every player, but that shouldn’t be misconstrued as softness.
Shough said it’s about establishing a foundation of two-way trust and accountability. McGuire is transfer Shough’s fourth head coach, after Mario Cristobal at Oregon and Matt Wells and Sonny Cumbie at Tech.
“Coach McGuire is better in almost every single way, as far as developing a culture that’s actually real,” Shough said. “I feel like our team is player-led, where he’s given us the reins to do our thing, but we wouldn’t be where we are without him.
“A lot of people may describe him as a players’ coach, but he still gets on your ass because he’s got such a high standard. He’s going to wrap his arm around your shoulder at the end of the day but do what’s best for the team. That’s pretty unique.”
McGuire says he doesn’t host players or pick them up at the airport in the Batmobile to be ostentatious, but, rather, to show what is achievable with channeled resolve and maximum effort.
Players are surprised, McGuire said, when he tells them the first house he lived in after his Aug. 6, 1971, birth was in a Texarkana, Texas, trailer park, the start of an unlikely life arc and career path.
Profound influences
His father George was a commercial air-conditioner installer. Mother Gail, following the birth of Joey’s younger sister, Kim, returned to school and earned a nursing degree.
Nursing jobs in Texarkana were scarce, so the McGuires moved to Crowley, where Gail’s brother was a dentist. Joey was a roly-poly seventh-grader, embittered that he’d been uprooted.
“My mom,” he said, “drove me to H.F. Stevens Middle School and told Coach Graves: ‘He will do anything you ask him to do. If he doesn’t make a team, he will be your manager.’ ”
McGuire played on the seventh-grade football B team, got cut in basketball and became manager. Like most of the kids in town, Joey played on youth league teams coached by George, but he lagged athletically and emotionally.
Then a kid named Roger Corn moved to town. Joey and Roger instantly clicked. Became inseparable. Roger was athletic and confident. Keeping pace with Roger steered Joey in an unfamiliar direction: Forward.
“Man, that dude literally changed my life,” McGuire said, becoming emotional. Corn would remain his best friend and open his eyes to other horizons — notably, Texas Tech, where Corn was a walk-on tight end — until he died in 2019 after a gallbladder infection.
As with anyone’s life path, McGuire’s had other fateful meetings and experiences. He’s thankful that in the summer after seventh grade his parents sent him to TCU’s weeklong football camp, headed by Wacker.
“He was bigger than life,” McGuire said. “He was so positive. He made me feel like a million bucks. He made everybody feel that way. That really kind of started me coming out of hatin’ where I was at.”
The following summer McGuire was named one of the MVPs of TCU’s camp. At Crowley High he became an all-district linebacker as a junior and all-district offensive guard as a senior, meanwhile helping George coach youth teams.
A career in coaching, though, wasn’t in Joey’s thought process. He enrolled at UT-Arlington, which didn’t even have football, to follow a tract to nursing school and ultimately achieve Gail’s vision that he’d become an anesthesiologist.
He says frequent road trips in his ‘79 Honda Accord to see Corn led to his falling in love with West Texas and the Tech campus — despite an, uh, incident in 1989.
After watching the Red Raiders beat Texas A&M in Jones Stadium, McGuire accompanied Corn to a team party at the home of quarterback Jamie Gill. McGuire listened as Red Raider players bragged about how they were going to whip their next opponent, No. 7 Arkansas, McGuire’s favorite childhood team.
“Guys, really?” he blurted. Corn grabbed his arm, but the damage was done.
“What did you say?” scowled defensive lineman Marcus Washington, rising to his feet.
“Hey, Roger,” Gill said. “You probably need to leave with your buddy.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said.
Lovestruck
Still, entering his junior year at UTA, McGuire planned to transfer to Tech and try to walk on to the team. Until love happened.
Joey had joined Kappa Sigma fraternity and was playing for and coaching its intramural flag football team. He also coached the flag team of Kappa’s sister sorority, Zeta Tau Alpha.
“Who’s that blonde?” McGuire asked one of his fraternity brothers.
“That’s Debbie. She’s got a pretty serious boyfriend, though.”
“They’ll be broken up in three weeks,” McGuire said.
Debbie’s version?
“He was very cocky, very loud. I asked my best friend, ‘Who is this guy?’ "
Joey left notes on Debbie’s car. He was persistent but also sweet, leaving Debbie a teddy bear that she still has. As for Joey’s three-week timetable . . .
“It took two,” he said.
Joey told Corn he was in love and couldn’t come to Tech. Not long after, he drove to Crowley and told Gail he no longer wanted to be an anesthesiologist. He wanted to coach, which meant changing his major.
“I was starting to ask Debbie to marry me, and she said, ‘You’ve got to graduate first,’ ” he said. “So I literally went to my adviser and said, ‘What’s the fastest way out of here?’ ”
He toiled for eight years as an assistant at Crowley and Cedar Hill before, at age 31, becoming Cedar Hill’s head coach.
By then the McGuires had daughter Raegan and son Garret, who grew up watching Dad transform Cedar Hill from football nobody to state powerhouse. As Garret neared high school, the chance to coach him at quarterback factored into Joey turning down assistant jobs at Tulsa, Hawaii and Texas, among others.
When Joey left Cedar Hill in 2017 to become Matt Rhule’s tight ends coach at Baylor, Garret, too, went to Waco and played four more years under Joey. It’s the Cedar Hill days, though, that are most indelible for Garret.
“I watched my dad walk the field after every game and every practice and pick up little pieces of trash,” Garret said. “He cares so much about every detail. It became contagious for other people to see.”
On Sundays McGuire was the first coach in the fieldhouse, clearing the bulletin board of the previous week’s scouting reports, diagrams and every last staple.
“He’d tell the equipment guys, ‘I’m never gonna wear white on grass,’ " Garret said. “You know why? Because when he was a young coach he had to wash the stains off of white pants.”
Raegan attended Midlothian High School, where she was a cheerleader and state-ranked powerlifter. She chose, though, to practice in Cedar Hill’s weight room and be close to her father.
Raegan attended Texas Tech, graduating in 2018. She jokes that “it was a tough pill to swallow” when her dad went to Baylor, but “above all, I’m a Joey McGuire fan.”
By the time McGuire interviewed for the Texas Tech job in November 2021, Raegan was a rising-star fashion designer in New York and Garret was an offensive assistant on Rhule’s Carolina Panthers staff.
For the McGuires, sting lingered from Joey turning down the UTSA job in December 2019, thinking he was in line to succeed Rhule at Baylor, which instead hired Dave Aranda.
The Texas Tech process, Raegan said, “was very confidential, but I kept thinking, ‘If they meet him they’re going to hire him. He’s meant to be in Lubbock.’ Then when my dad FaceTimed us — he never FaceTimes — I just knew what it was.”
Raegan had the presence of mind to screenshot the moment Joey delivered the news to Debbie, Garret and Raegan. It’s frozen in time, but 20 months later still emotional.
“There’s a saying that ‘Football is not who you are; it’s what you do,’” Garret said. “But I think in my family football is who we are. We believe we’re put on this Earth to coach football and teach about life through the game.
“My dad has been a father figure to so many players and mom has been a mother figure to so many.”
Reverend Joey
On July 8 in Little Elm, Tech defensive quality controls assistant coach James Lockhart IV married Amalia Bowden.
Presiding over the ceremony was Joey McGuire, who coached defensive end Lockhart at Baylor. Lockhart says McGuire long has been a mentor and confidant, but especially since James Lockhart III’s death last year.
In 2020 McGuire officiated the wedding of Plano High and Baylor product and current Carolina Panther Sam Tecklenburg to Kelsey Stevens.
And next April in San Diego, McGuire is scheduled to officiate the nuptials of Tyler Shough and Jordan Wormdahl.
“He’s been so important and welcoming to both of us,” Shough said. “Honestly we can’t think of anybody better. He’s perfect.”
Just two months ago, also in Little Elm, an emotional McGuire walked Raegan down the aisle to, coincidentally, another Joe, Tocco.
Debbie says she cried when father and daughter danced to Rascal Flatts’ “My Wish,” and that there wasn’t a dry eye in sight when Joey during the previous night’s rehearsal dinner made an impromptu toast, addressing it solely to Raegan.
“One thing he said was, ‘To take in Raegan is to take in everything right in the world; there’s a sense of brightness,’” Raegan said. “And the whole time I’m thinking, ‘I literally got these things from you and mom.’”
McGuire turns 52 next month. For his 51st birthday, Debbie got him a vanity plate for the Batmobile, “Take3,” a McGuire mantra dating to the Cedar Hill days that stresses the goal of winning each game’s turnover margin by 3.
McGuire says he long ago set a goal of owning a Corvette by age 50. Debbie snuck the Batmobile into their Midlothian home garage a few days before that birthday, to the shock of Joey, surrounded by family and friends, when he opened the overhead door.
Perhaps it was an omen that Debbie chose a black Corvette. Four months later, Tech came calling. Had she known that would happen, she says, she’d have gotten red interior.
“It didn’t go unnoticed by us that he was 50 when Tech called,” she said. “We want Lubbock and Raider Nation to know that we are so thankful.
“We thought he was going to get the Baylor job, but he got to come here and be Joey. Him climbing a crane? I did not want that. That’s just him.”
This is his mountaintop. It’s a view he plans to prolong.
“I’ve told Debbie I’m never going to retire,” he said. “I have to be around players. That is why I was put on this Earth.
“So my plan is to be here and ride things out to the end. Hopefully, it’s not dropping dead on the sideline. We’d need it to be after a win. Many, many years from now.”
Twitter: @Townbrad
