Death to the Texas Tech Tortilla Throw

“We are no longer going to encourage nor permit the throwing of tortillas at the opening kickoff for our home football games.” Those were the comments from Texas Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt on Monday in a joint-press conference with head coach Joey McGuire. The Texas Tech tortilla throw officially went the way of the do-do bird with those reverberating comments by Hocutt.

Death to the Texas Tech Tortilla Throw

How We Got Here

“We cannot risk letting our actions penalize our football team. The stakes are too high, and we need to help (by) not risk penalize our team again for throwing tortillas.”

To properly set the stage, we need to go back to the off-season before the 2025 season started. In August, the Big 12 held a vote to re-emphasize an existing rule regarding fans who throw items onto the field. It passed with a vote of 15-1. Who was the one vote? In the least shocking event, it Hocutt. He was defiant in his message. He wanted to rightfully uphold a unique tradition. Check out his remarks from an August 14^th tweet about it.

But as the season progressed with a roster that could challenge for best team in program history, the Texas Tech tortilla tossing started to get out of hand. What was once reserved for just the opening kickoff began to linger into the game further and further. At his weekly press conference prior to the Kansas game, McGuire stressed that the fan interaction couldn’t be about the tortillas. Those warnings fell on deaf (and likely highly intoxicated) ears.

$100,000 Tortillas

The Kansas game brought one of the most electric atmospheres Jones At&t Stadium had seen in quite a while. It was a game that Texas Tech won with a dominating second half performance, including a defensive shutout and career day by running back Cameron Dickey. But the game included the home team getting penalized not once, but twice, for violating the Big 12 rules. While it did not cost the Red Raiders the game, it resulted in a heated post-game exchange between McGuire and head coach Lance Leipold. It was clear Leipold wasn’t happy with the constant barrage of things coming onto the field and seemingly pointed the finger at McGuire. Leipold’s post game comments also included claiming an open-pocket knife was thrown at his team, which was later found to be untrue.

Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark clearly had seen enough out of the Red Raider fan base. A memo was sent out a few days after the Kansas game that all schools would be fined $100,000 if schools were penalized for throwing items onto the field. But after careful consideration, Hocutt made the necessary decision to ban the toss. “The situation is on me. I leaned into this of throwing tortillas at the beginning of the football season. Now I must ask everyone to stop, and I must ask our staff to enforce it on game days,” Hocutt said.

Traditions Make College Football Unique

Again, it is worth noting that Hocutt is being the adult in the room. As is the case with most situations involving a large group of people, when one person (or in this case a few) poop their pants, everyone now is forced to wear diapers. While Hocutt is doing the right thing trying to ensure the best roster this program has ever seen is never fighting a penalty battle, it doesn’t make the situation any less deflating. One of the reason college football is so different from the NFL is the in-stadium experience. A big chunk of that experience are the long-standing traditions at each school. For crying out loud, Colorado runs with an actual buffalo across the entire field. Auburn, who’s mascot is a Tiger, has an eagle fly around the stadium and their rallying cry is “War Eagle.”

The list is never ending with such unique traditions in the sport. The Texas Tech tortillas throw was one of the lesser-known ones across college football. But just like the scene in National Lampoon’s Animal House, “only we can do that to our pledges” takes on the meaning of “everyone else just doesn’t get it because that’s what we do.” This should have never been an issue for the fans. Too many people have the most obscure memories of eating a hole out of the middle of tortilla in the stadium, so it was more aerodynamic flying through the West Texas sky (hat tip to the engineering students who figured that out).

The Texas Tech Tortilla Throw Will Always Fly in the Hearts of Red Raider Nation

Excuse Last Word while using this as a Braveheart moment against the Big 12 office. “They may take away our tortillas, but they’ll never take our spirit!” or something like that. I’m sure Big 12 offices are shaking in their boots about pallets of United tortillas arriving at their corporate office. But lets all take a 30-second timeout on this. It was incredibly fun to chuck a piece of food on the field with zero inhibitions. For that brief moment, everyone was able to channel their inner child without mom or dad scolding them. It would still be here if people treated it as such. Instead, too many people took this too far. So, 2025 could very well end with a Big 12 championship for this football team. But just like the Thanos meme, when people ask what did it cost for that championship, they won’t say $25 million in NIL. It cost them their tortillas.