photo by: AP Photo/Annie Rice

Texas Tech students throw tortillas before the NCAA college football game against Kansas, Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025, in Lubbock, Texas.

Updated 9:49 p.m. Monday, Oct. 13, 2025:

Lubbock, Texas — Texas Tech fans’ decades-old tradition of throwing tortillas on the field during kickoffs at Jones AT&T Stadium cost their team 27 yards on the field on Saturday night.

That was a result of a recent Big 12 rule against throwing objects — one that features a “three-strikes policy,” as the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal put it — that prompted a pair of unsportsmanlike conduct penalties against the Red Raiders.

The tradition also, however, drew the ire of Kansas coach Lance Leipold, though not because of the tortillas themselves. He said that during the Jayhawks’ 42-17 loss to Tech, a member of KU’s staff got hit by a pocketknife thrown from the stands.

“It’s ridiculous,” Leipold said. “It’s supposed to be for safety and things like that. It’s a culture that’s been accepted to a point and it hasn’t changed. And eventually somebody’s going to be seriously hurt, unfortunately.”

Leipold said that the pocketknife hit the KU staffer during the third quarter. A KU spokesperson said that the second penalty incurred by the Tech fans — which was assessed prior to the Jayhawks’ first drive of the fourth quarter — was a direct result of the thrown pocketknife, which he referred to as a Swiss Army-style knife.

The previous penalty had occurred at the start of a Tech drive in the second quarter, backing the Red Raiders up from their 25-yard line half the distance to the goal.

The Big 12 began “a formal review of incidents of items being thrown onto the field” during the game, sources close to the conference said on Sunday afternoon.

David Collier of KAMC News posted on X on Monday evening that Tech “confirmed a closed pocketknife was discovered on the KU sideline Saturday. It was given to Texas Tech, then turned over to (Texas Tech police).” A Texas Tech spokesperson told the Journal-World in a text message later on Monday night that the school had submitted its report to the league, but that Tech would wait for the league to respond before making a statement on what exactly it had learned from reviewing in-stadium video.

Over the course of the game, a warning that told fans “Don’t throw items on the field” and “Cease throwing tortillas on the field” popped up on the stadium video board on three separate occasions. Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire had issued his own sort of warning earlier in the week, in the lead-up to the game, when during a weekly press conference he encouraged fans to create an intense atmosphere for the matchup without “being defiant” of the Big 12’s new rule.

“It’s not about the tortillas this week,” he said.

But despite his plea, it became somewhat about the tortillas all the same, and after the game, a reporter asked McGuire about a “heated exchange” he had with Leipold following the conclusion of the game.

A video of the interaction was posted on social media by Collier late Saturday night. The footage includes Leipold complimenting McGuire on his “really good team” before apparently relaying what he said happened with the knife, which McGuire acknowledges. Leipold says multiple times, “That’s (expletive),” and McGuire tells him, “Coach, I can’t do anything about it. You want me to do something (expletive) about it?” Leipold says, “I just told you,” and McGuire responds, “I know, and I said I got it.”

Shortly afterward, McGuire said in his postgame press conference that he and Leipold were both frustrated by the thrown objects. (Leipold, for his part, said he felt officials were frustrated at one point during the game too.)

“We’ve got a new rule in this league and we know the rule, and we didn’t follow it, and we got penalized tonight, two 15-yard penalties, and he was frustrated on that side,” McGuire said. “We got to be better. We got to do a better job. We got to find a way to do a better job as a whole, all of us, and we will. We’ve got two weeks to have a better plan and get the point across of what the rule is. Because it’s going to catch up with us.”

He said that any fan who throws tortillas more than once is making it “all about you.”

“Is that a Red Raider?” he asked. “If you came to the game and you love this team and you’re passionate about this team, but yet you’re going to throw another tortilla and you know it’s against the rules?”

On the whole, Leipold said he felt the new rule — which was approved in August by a 15-1 vote, with Texas Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt the lone dissenter — was handled “very poorly” on Saturday.

“Our conference office, and you can ask (Big 12 chief football officer) Scott Draper and them, (was) very poor at handling it,” Leipold said. “One of the officials almost got hit and tried to throw a flag, and it got picked up, so that was disappointing. We have a policy put in that wasn’t followed through, so I was very disappointed on how that was.”

photo by: AP Photo/Annie Rice

Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire, center, speaks to Kansas head coach Lance Leipold, left, after the end of the NCAA college football game, Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025, in Lubbock, Texas.