LUBBOCK, Texas — Texas Tech has lost its tortilla battle with the Big 12.
Athletic director Kirby Hocutt said Monday that any fans found throwing tortillas onto the field during home games at Jones AT&T Stadium will be banned from attending all university sporting events for the rest of the year.
Hocutt’s announcement comes after Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark sent a memo last week to inform member institutions that schools would be punished for throwing objects onto the field. The first infraction would merit a warning, and the second offense would come with a $100,000 fine and a 15-yard penalty.
“The stakes are too high and we need to help not risk penalizing our team again for throwing tortillas,” Hocutt said.
The new rule ends a decades-old tradition. The prevailing theory for its origin is a 1992 matchup between the Red Raiders and Texas A&M, during which the ESPN broadcast announcer remarked that Lubbock had nothing except football and a tortilla factory. Students responded by flinging tortillas onto the field—a tradition that may have ended Monday with Hocutt’s announcement.
Tortillas are not handed out inside the stadium, but instead smuggled in by fans as they enter the gates. Security checkpoints at the entrances only check boots and the waistlines of fans‘ clothing as they enter the stadium, which provides an easy opening for spectators to flout the rules.
“Right before I put my belt on, I leave my zipper unzipped and I go ahead and take a couple of tortillas [wrapped in plastic] and stick them in my pants,” Keith, a junior from South Korea, tells Front Office Sports. “When we’re sitting down in the stands, and it’s right before kickoff, I take them out of my pants and hand them to my people and go crazy.” Security has little interest in searching students’ underwear, making the tortilla onslaught almost unstoppable.
In 2016, Baker Mayfield’s Sooners defeated Patrick Mahomes’s Red Raiders in a 66–59 win. In celebration, Mayfield picked up a tortilla from the field and took a bite from it—and later said he regretted it when he thought about where it might have been before it’d been thrown.
One of the main hubs for purchasing tortillas is a Walmart located next to Jones AT&T Stadium, which is also close to a large portion of student housing. A Walmart employee at the location told FOS that the location sold nearly $1,000 in tortillas among three brands for the Red Raiders’ Oct. 11 home game against the Jayhawks. That’s more than 4,000 tortillas, largely among three brands—Mission, Albuquerque, and Great Value. The representative said the store does not expect a drop-off in tortilla sales as students may still try to find their way around the new rules.
Following its win over Kansas, the Big 12 fined Texas Tech $25,000 for throwing tortillas onto the field and also assessed two separate 15-yard personal penalties. (The conference also levied a $25,000 penalty against Kansas after coach Lance Leipold inaccurately claimed that a pocketknife was thrown and hit one of his staff members, and criticized both the Big 12 and Texas Tech for their handling of objects thrown onto the field.)
This summer, ADs in the Big 12 voted to establish a league-wide policy for objects thrown onto the field, which included two warnings followed by 15-yard penalties for each subsequent infraction. Hocutt was the only AD in the 16-person group to vote against the policy.
The No. 14 Red Raiders are off to a hot start thanks in part to heavy booster spending on players. One of those boosters, billionaire Cody Campbell, implored fans to “leave your tortillas at home (or in your pants)” ahead of Saturday’s game against Oklahoma State.
