August 19, 2025
Locked On Women’s Basketball: The boom happening at Texas Tech
Ryan Hyatt from TheRaiderland.com joins Missy Heidrick to talk all things Texas Tech in the changing landscape of college athletics
On the latest episode of Locked On Women’s Basketball, host Missy Heidrick is joined by Ryan Hyatt, a Big 12 media veteran and founder of TheRaiderland.com to discuss, in her own words, the “boom happening” in Texas, and, really, all of college sports, in a new era of NIL (Name, Image and Likeness).
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After the passing of the House vs NCAA settlement this past July—which allows Division I athletic programs to directly pay their players—there’s now a “shift,” as Hyatt explains, in that “universities are figuring out how to invest in people and not things.”
“Before NIL, before the straight-up payment of players in the House [vs NCAA] settlement, all you can spend your money on was a new juice bar, another weight room, another facade,” he continues. “Now you’re not going to do that. You’re going to spend it on players and on the people. And that, to me, is the biggest shift I think we’ve seen in the last 10 years, is a much more professional sports model.”
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With the fall season approaching, only time will tell how the new settlement and evolution of NIL continue to unfold. To understand how the changes affect the Red Raiders going forward, Heidrick and Hyatt look back at the history of Texas Tech and how the sports landscape there has changed over the years before looking ahead at where it is today.
Heidrick and Hyatt also talked about the people investing in Texas Tech athletics, contributing to the increased profile of the school’s programs, namely Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
“He came along at just the perfect time in this college landscape and the changing landscape to have that impact as a professional player,” Hyatt said. “He almost single-handedly delivered the new Adidas apparel contract to Texas Tech. … It was Patrick Mahomes appearing on TV in a Texas Tech shirt at a Tech basketball game a few years ago, and he put tape across the Under Armour portion of the shirt and hand-wrote Adidas.”
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Editor’s note (Aug. 19, 6:53 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this story had a spelling mistake. Today’s podcast was hosted by Missy Heidrick, not Hendricks.
