The Texas Tech football team won't have to wait until a Sept. 7 game at Washington State to face a noisy atmosphere that makes communication difficult. It'll be closer to July 31 when that happens.

That's the day the Red Raiders begin preseason practice, and Tech coach Joey McGuire plans to make August a month of putting his team — the offense, in particular — into simulated road-game environments.

"We're going to try to make the offense as uncomfortable as possible," McGuire said. "I've never had the offense on the visitors' sideline. I know that sounds stupid, but we're going to make them come in on the visitors' sideline. We're going to put crowd noise behind them during the scrimmage."

The Red Raiders are 10-3 at home under McGuire and 3-8 on the road. The disparity has made improvement on the road a point of emphasis.

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Two months ago, McGuire and four other Tech staff members went to Detroit to observe the Lions' second session of offseason organized team activities. One of the points of the trip was to visit with Lions coach Dan Campbell, whose team went 6-3 in regular-season road games last year, including wins over the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, two other playoff teams and two teams who'd made the playoffs the year before.

"It was great, man," McGuire said. "Dan Campbell is creating a monster. Just the atmosphere, the environment, the pace of practice. I got to talk to him for about 45 minutes, just on different things. We're going to incorporate some stuff he talked about, how they practiced. We're going to do it during camp."

The Red Raiders have used crowd noise over loudspeakers in practice during game preparation. That's nothing new, but it's commonly used in season on weeks of road games. McGuire hopes the attention paid in August will pay off, especially when the Red Raiders go to TCU, Iowa State and Oklahoma State in late October and November.

"We're going to start it off during camp," McGuire said, "because at the end of the day, if we're going to be in the mix for who's going to be playing the Big 12 championship, we've got to win on the road. We've got to be able to go into Ames, we've got to be able to go into Stillwater, we've got to be able to go into Fort Worth late in the season and win those games."

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This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Joey McGuire on Texas Tech football prep ideas from Lions' Dan Campbell