The Red Raider Keeps Coming Back — And That’s A Good Thing

Texas Tech’s curious journey from matador to mounted warrior.

Andre Billeaudeaux, Bill Dieckman | August 22, 2026

Washington’s NFL franchise has spent years quietly reclaiming pieces of its former Redskins identity. The burgundy returned. The gold pants came back. Championship uniforms reappeared. Then the old spear. Most recently the fight song lyric “Braves on the warpath”—absent for more than 2,000 days—was restored and heard again in the stadium.

Texas Tech did something similar nearly a century ago—only in reverse.

It began with a matador. Piece by piece the Spanish bullfighter disappeared, and something that looked far more at home on the old Comanche frontier took his place.

Texas Technological College opened in Lubbock in 1925, in country the university itself now describes as once the heart of the Comanchería. Texas Tech formally acknowledges that history. Its Staff Senate recognizes the university, Lubbock, and the surrounding region as ancestral territory of the Comanche and Mescalero Apache peoples, an acknowledgment now built into certain university meetings and public events.

The South Plains around Lubbock formed the core of that vast domain. From these same plains came the largest Native American raid ever visited upon Texas—the Great Raid of 1840. Led by Buffalo Hump and including Kiowa allies, hundreds of warriors rode out of the western plains, struck Victoria, then sacked and burned Linnville on the Gulf Coast, returning with thousands of captured horses. By any measure of pure raid—mobility, depth of penetration, relative effort, and volume of valuables carried away—it remains unmatched. The land that later became home to Texas Tech had long been the staging ground of mounted warriors and raiders.

Yet the school’s first athletic identity was Spanish. The teams were the Matadors, chosen for the campus’s Spanish Renaissance architecture and a romantic comparison between the West Texas plains and Spain. Scarlet and black followed in 1926, explained as the matador’s red cape and black costume.

A matador kills bulls in an arena. He does not........

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