LOS ANGELES — It’s convenient to hand No. 3 TCU the Cinderella crown no matter what happens in the College Football Playoff Championship against No. 1 Georgia on Monday at Sofi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif.
This oversimplifies what really happened in Fort Worth, Texas. TCU’s journey from the defunct Southwest Conference featured stops across the country through the WAC, Conference-USA and Mountain West – and nearly the Big East until the Horned Frogs found a home in the Big 12 It’s a tale the size of Texas, that’s for sure.
This is the story of how you build a college football candidate who doesn’t have a royal lineage. This does not happen with a magic moment.
“The key word is engagement,” TCU play-by-play announcer Brian Estridge told Sporting News. “Obviously there’s a financial commitment, but there has to be an emotional commitment as well. I don’t think every place has that. TCU alumni – and I’m not one but I’m all time with them – the alumni made that emotional commitment. It means something to them. They want him to excel at a high level.
“The roots run deep,” Estridge continued. “It’s not lipstick on a pig. It’s a sincere, diligent, deep-rooted love for school that gives it a solid foundation.”
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Turns out you don’t put lipstick on a horned frog either. Estridge recalled a moment 60 years after the Horned Frogs’ final national championship season in 1938. It was during Dennis Franchione’s first season before TCU’s 1998 Sun Bowl game against USC. A simple gesture showed this commitment.
“TCU is committed to buying a bigger block of tickets,” Estridge told Sporting News. “People thought they would. They said, ‘Here’s a checkbook. What do we need to enter? Sometimes, unfortunately, you have to buy your place. They did it.”
This helped start a chain reaction that continues today. The Horned Frogs beat the Trojans 28-19 and won their first bowl game since the 1957 Cotton Bowl. the next step was to attract players.
LaDainian Tomlinson played in that Sun Bowl before becoming a superstar the next two seasons. He rushed for 5,387 yards and 56 touchdowns and finished fourth in voting for the Heisman Trophy in 2000. Tomlinson was one of six players drafted in the 2001 NFL Draft. The Horned Frogs had 49 other players drafted since. Cornerback Tre’Vius Hodges-Tomlinson, Tomlinson’s nephew, won the Thorpe Award. It brought a legacy
“He’s been a great mentor in any lifetime and a great guy,” Hodges-Tomlinson said. “He put me on the right path and makes sure that throughout my career I continue to stay consistent.”
Consistency is what Gary Patterson brought to the program through the process of upgrading to the Power 5. Patterson took over from Franchione, who left for Alabama at the end of the 2000 season. Patterson had two seasons 10 WAC wins from 2001-04 before dominating the Mountain West Conference with a 77-13 record from 2005-11. That’s when TCU became one of BCS’ top three breakers along with Boise State and Utah. In 2010, Sonny Dykes began his first head coaching job at Louisiana Tech. Like the rest of the nation, Dykes didn’t quite understand what was going on at TCU at the time.
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“I was pretty knee-deep in college football,” Dykes said on Media Day Saturday. “I’m not sure I understood TCU’s consistent success. I was doing my own thing and working. For some reason, it didn’t seem like TCU could have been the greatest story in college football, but they deserved probably just because the team is really strong, really consistent. (They) won a lot of big games.”
TCU took advantage of the big stage games. Boise State beat the Horned Frogs 17-10 in the Fiesta Bowl after the 2009 season — an undefeated battle that was ruled out by Alabama and Texas when discussing the BCS championship. It was a small part of the groundwork for the current four-team playoffs.
The Horned Frogs warmed it all up as they won. In 2010, Andy Dalton led a 13-0 season that culminated in a 21-19 win over Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl. TCU pushed back when Ohio State athletic director E. Gordon Gee said they played the “Little Sisters of the Poor” by putting up a billboard in Columbus, Ohio that read, “Congratulations TCU on their BCS Rose Bowl victory – Little Sisters of the Poor.”
“You dress for the job you want, not the job you have,” Estridge said. “That’s what TCU has always done. They dressed for the job they wanted and they wanted to be in the Big 12. They try to look the part and act and spend the good money. way.”
The Horned Frogs joined the Big 12 just in time for college football’s playoff era, but the battle for respect at the highest level continued. TCU was bypassed by Ohio State in 2014. TCU responded by drilling Mississippi State 42-3 in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl. When you see all those big game wins, the 51-45 win over No. 2 Michigan in the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl is less of a surprise.
This, however, was the result of Patterson dropping out at the right time. TCU had a 21-22 record from 2018-22. It would have been just as easy to slip into the back half of the Big 12 hierarchy, especially with the appearance of the transfer portal and name, image and likeness. Now, with Texas and Oklahoma leaving for the SEC, TCU is poised to become the conference’s flagship program.
“It shows your level of expectation,” Estridge said. “To be able to make that change, say, ‘We’re not where we need to be when we put so much money and emotion into it – we need to be better. They did it and it paid off.”
TCU hired Dykes away from rival SMU, and early returns have been astonishing. The Horned Frogs were picked to finish seventh in the Big 12, but they put 25 years of lessons into action, even though the script reads like a corny sports movie with Dykes and quarterback Max Duggan in the lead roles.
Dykes heard the stories of the lean years of the Southwestern Conference days that bottomed out in 1997 when the Horned Frogs went 1-10 in the WAC. He had his ups and downs from Louisiana Tech to Cal, but he also had a vision for the program.
Duggan, a three-year-old starter who didn’t earn the starting job in fall camp, took over the starting job when Chandler Morris was injured in Game 1.
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The Horned Frogs have beaten four straight ranked opponents in October, starting with a 55-24 win over Oklahoma. Griffin Kell’s mad dash for a last-second field goal against Baylor preceded a one-score win over Texas.
TCU responded for the overtime loss to Kansas State in the Big 12 Championship thriller with Michigan. Oklahoma, Texas and Michigan are three of the top six programs of all time by total wins. TCU upset them all to get to this place. The fan base is on board and they’ve taken the Hypnotoad with them.
“You started seeing more signs around the city,” Hodges-Tomlinson said. “You start seeing people, you know, TCU flags in their cars and stuff like that. You start seeing people coming to our practices and you know people are there for us and people start noticing that. , I go to Target, and I don’t even need to have a TCU shirt (to be recognized) Overall, man, you know, becoming someone in your community, man, it’s It’s incredible.
More financial commitment followed this success. The Horned Frogs announced a $40 million facility upgrade in December. Dykes was named Coach of the Year by several outlets including Sporting News. On Saturday, he received the Eddie Robinson Coach of the Year Award.
Duggan, meanwhile, finished second in Heisman Trophy voting behind USC’s Caleb Williams. From the inside, Duggan knows the true history of TCU.
“I guess in our eyes for our program, I guess we don’t really see it as a Cinderella story,” Duggan said. “We believe in ourselves and feel that we have earned this position.
“Yes, we know we haven’t won a national title since 1938, but we’ve had so many great teams before in those years,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of great years in football and a lot of teams have built this program to get us to this point.”
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It’s a long-term process, but few would have guessed that TCU would be in a position to win a national championship against Georgia on Monday. It was a collection of moments that led to this magical season.
“It gives everyone hope,” Dykes said. “I think that’s the great thing about our team this year. When you look at what we’ve been able to do. Schools that haven’t been traditional powers historically can look and say, ‘Hey, we can do it. …I think they’re right. I really believe it comes down to playing on Saturdays. Sometimes the size of your stadium has no impact on this. Sometimes the budget has no impact on that. Sometimes how the team played in 1960 has no impact on that.”
Most of the time, though, and TCU is committed to making it happen — even if it happened faster than expected under Dykes. Now they will be expected to do it again.
It’s not a fairy tale. He’s an old-school American legend.