Jeff Goodman Responds to Texas Tech Fans About His ‘Worst Job’ Comments

If you missed the moderate drama yesterday on Twitter with Jeff Goodman of Stadium and Texas Tech fans, I'll catch you up real quick. Long story short: Goodman tried to compliment Texas Tech Basketball Head Coach Mark Adams, saying he thought Texas Tech would fall off a cliff but instead has improved from the previous season.

Dead wrong, yes, but still, Goodman was admitting he was wrong. Where he went off the rails was that immediately after the compliment, he tried to clarify his off-the-cliff comments by saying he thought Adams would fail not only because he didn't believe in Adams, but because Texas Tech was the worst job in the Big 12.

The firestorm on Twitter started when my podcast, the Gamblin' Gauchos, called him out for the BS take:

There was some back-and-forth on Twitter during the day, but things had died down for the most part. We thought Goodman was an idiot. Goodman was doing a poor job on Twitter to convince us otherwise.

Before we completely wrote off Goodman, we made an offer to have him onto the podcast to try and explain himself in a long-form way, instead of being limited to 280 characters.

We invited Goodman on the podcast, with absolutely no reason to believe that he'd accept the invitation. We'd been obliterating him online for hours, and he'd been responding to Texas Tech fans in our mentions.

To Goodman's credit, he accepted the invitation to come into a potentially-hostile environment with two guys who'd been combative.

We talked for nearly 40 minutes in which we disagreed on most points, but were able to understand the national perspective that Goodman was bringing to the podcast.

You can listen to the entire interview here:

After the episode, Texas Tech fans were impressed with Goodman's attempt to explain himself:

I still don't know if Jeff Goodman understands that there are direct flights from Boston to Lubbock or if he truly thinks that Mark Adams can't recruit, but I do know that Goodman isn't a national media member who doesn't care about Texas Tech. He's just another guy who needs to be educated on Lubbock and the Texas Tech community.

There's no shame in being ignorant. In my opinion, if more people responded to criticism like Goodman did, the world might be a more understanding place. It might not be a better place, but at least there would be more common ground.