Of the 41 states in the union that have a Football Bowl Subdivision team within their borders, none have more than Texas.

For 12 days, as teams nationwide dig into preseason drills, USA TODAY Sports’ college football reporters are traversing the state of Texas and visiting each of its one dozen FBS programs. AT&T presents Two Weeks in Texas …

Day 5: Texas Tech

LUBBOCK, Texas — The signs bracketing Kliff Kingsbury’s designated parking space along the west side of Jones AT&T Stadium are labeled with capitalized, watch-your-step reminders of its intended inhabitant, worded just strongly enough to ward off a mindless would-be parker eyeballing the spot closest to Texas Tech’s football offices.

In a way, the placards are unnecessary: Kingsbury’s vehicle can be found between the white lines from 4 a.m., when he pulls into a car-less lot, until close to 9 p.m., when he leaves an equally empty facility.

This is nothing new; Kingsbury has been an early arriver throughout his coaching career, which began at the University of Houston in 2008 and moved to Texas Tech, his alma mater, prior to the 2013 season. Never before, however, has Kingsbury’s arrival and departure — let alone the hours of work in between — been marked by such … quiet.

“We put it on ourselves,” senior defensive Brandon Jackson said. “We gave people a reason to not want to talk about Texas Tech.”

TWO WEEKS IN TEXAS: The series so far

Enormous change has come to Kingsbury and the Red Raiders, motivated in significant part by last season’s eight-loss finish, with no change more immediately noticeable than the distinct lack of trendiness accompanying a program and coach just one year removed from overwhelming, near-suffocating popularity.

Yet to call this merely a byproduct of past failures ignores the transition underway within the Red Raiders’ front door, one propelled by a third-year coach stressing substance over style and voluntarily avoiding the distractions that, with the gift of hindsight, contributed to last season’s disconcerting misstep.

“I think that was the thought after the year we had, just to grind and not put anything out there and not try to be visible,” Kingsbury told USA TODAY Sports. “We want to focus this year on just winning games. Let’s be all about winning games. So yeah, that was definitely a conscious decision as a program to take that direction.”

Mentally stronger as a unit, more committed to the details, driven by a painful step backward and brimming with returning talent and experience, Texas Tech prepares for the 2015 season with a redeveloped self-image: as a Big 12 Conference underdog, true, but a group with the ability and motivation to far exceed expectations — as the flip side to last year’s team, essentially.

At its most basic level, 4-8 has led to growth, on the sidelines and off.

“First we kind of rode with, you know, the ‘cool coaching staff,’ and Coach Kingsbury’s getting all this publicity,” offensive coordinator Eric Morris said. “And after that, he’s changed. You’ve seen him grow as a head coach. He’s tried to throw all that on the back burner and go back to what got him to where he’s at so quickly, and that’s hard work.”

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For Texas Tech players, a brutal period of self-reflection began immediately after a two-point loss to Baylor capped the regular season. The year was not merely expressed in wins and losses; for the Red Raiders’ returning team leaders — a senior core that provides the team’s backbone — last fall was defined by a tumultuous locker room, by a misplaced identity, by red-faced embarrassment.

“We went up and down as a locker room,” senior linebacker Pete Robertson said. “Guys were pointing fingers, as usual. That’s what you do when you’re losing and you don’t know what’s going on, a lot of guys will point fingers. We were just confused. We were a confused team.”

It reached this point: For weeks after the Baylor defeat, some players chose not to wear Texas Tech gear around Lubbock, such were the lingering aftershocks of a “shameful” season, said Jackson.

“It was real hard to walk around Lubbock,” he said. “We all want to be tough and to stay together and to do what we do for our fans and our school, but when we let them down the way we did last year … ”

Added Robertson, “We were all ashamed. What we put on there on that film is not us. It’s not our team.”

The self-loathing continued into early January, when Texas Tech coaches and players convened a series of plate-clearing, palate-cleansing meetings of the minds — what Morris termed the Red Raiders’ “come-to-Jesus moment.”

Kingsbury and his staff detailed what had gone wrong during the previous five months — chronic issues such as turnovers and penalties — and outlined a new plan of action. Let’s focus on the positive things we’re doing, they said, and let’s stop talking about the past.

“You go 4-8 like we did, when you’re historically bad in some areas like we were, you have to completely take a hard look at yourself,” Kingsbury said. “What can we do to get better? It made us take some serious self-evaluation, which I think will be the best thing that ever happened here.”

The Red Raiders are no longer talking about last season, technically speaking; they’re thinking about it, however, and using its “bitter taste,” senior center Jared Kaster said, as motivation.

“We don’t want that to happen again,” said Kaster. “That’s not Texas Tech … that’s not Texas Tech football. The people out here in west Texas, they don’t like that. It’s just another thing as motivation. You let that fire you up all offseason. Some of that stuff you let motivate you.”

It’s good for this team to carry last season’s disappointment, Jackson said, even if his coaches have stressed otherwise; there’s strength to be found in remembering the recent past.

“Remember the sting, remember how hard we worked last year and how hard we lost,” he said. “How hard it was to come back to Lubbock and no one was screaming our name. As much as we want to forget about it we can’t. And I encourage people not to. You don’t have to forget things like that. It makes you better.”

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There’s additional motivation to be found to the east, in the single-season leap made a newly minted Big 12 power: TCU finished 4-8 in 2013 but rocketed to the top of the conference a year ago, winning 12 games and finishing within striking distance of the College Football Playoff.

It’s easy to pinpoint the parallels between the two programs, though a Texas Tech leap into championship contention seems ahead of schedule — there’s athleticism but not enough experienced depth, even as Kingsbury and his staff add swaths of local talent with each passing recruiting cycle.

The Horned Frogs nonetheless stand as the nearest beacon for a program anticipating substantial growth in the very near future — growth mirrored around the football facilities, in a massive, $160-plus million construction project consisting of a new indoor facility and refurbishments to both the north and south end zones.

“You look at what they’ve done,” Kaster said of TCU. “They did a phenomenal job last year. You look at where they came from at 4-8 and think, heck, we were in that same situation, we can do the same thing.”

Said senior left tackle Le’Raven Clark, “Anybody can turn it around. We can turn it around same as they did.”

Yet there has already been a turnaround, if imperceptible to those outside the Red Raiders’ front door. It’s found in Kingsbury’s own growth, as he, much like his team, learns and develops with experience.

“I would hope that I’m a much better coach today, and I feel like I am,” he said. “Than I was beginning of last year, no doubt. Not even close.”

And it’s seen most clearly in the disappearance of the program’s former trendiness, and in how the Red Raiders have welcomed a shift from loud overconfidence to quiet self-assurance.

“With this coaching staff and this team, I just feel like we’ve got every single tool to beat every single team,” Robertson said. “This year, we’re just coming back as silent killers. We’re trying to make everything happen and do everything the right way, the silent way, with or without the media attention.”