Horned Frogs take unexpected leap into CFP final
GLENDALE, Ariz. — TCU’s wild ride has one more stop.
The Horned Frogs are headed to Sofi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., about 10 miles from Hollywood. Just about the perfect place to end a storybook season for the most improbable team to ever make the College Football Playoff.
Max Duggan accounted for four touchdowns, TCU returned two interceptions for scores, and the thirdranked Horned Frogs withstood a frenetic second-half surge by No. 2 Michigan to win the Fiesta Bowl, 51-45, Saturday night.
TCU (13-1) will play reigning champion Georgia, a 42-41 winner over Ohio State, on Jan. 9 for the national title.
Coming off a losing 2021 season and picked to finish seventh in the Big 12 in Sonny Dykes’ first year as coach, the Horned Frogs will try to win the program’s first national championship since 1938.
It took TCU six weeks to get ranked this season, and almost every step of the way their worthiness was doubted.
“At some point, you just kind of quit listening to what everybody says,” Dykes said.
Duggan and the Frogs will be underdogs in the title game, Georgia opening as a 13½-point favorite. That didn’t matter much against Michigan (13-1) as they took it to the big, bad Big Ten champions and turned the Fiesta Bowl into a circa-2010, Big 12-style scorefest.
“We heard all week how they were going to out-physical us,” TCU linebacker Dee Winters said.
It was the highest scoring Fiesta Bowl ever and the second-highest scoring CFP game behind Georgia’s 54-48 Rose Bowl victory against Oklahoma on Jan. 1, 2018.
Maybe it was fitting.
TCU, the little private school from Fort Worth that was left out of the Big 12 when it first formed in the mid1990s, became the first team from the conference to win a CFP game and will be the first to play for a national title since Texas in 2009.
This one was 34-16 after Dee Winters’ 29-yard pick-6 with 2:46 left in the third quarter.
Of course, nothing has come easy for these Frogs. During their unbeaten regular season, they won seven straight games by 10 points or fewer.
What followed was five touchdown drives — with a TCU turnover in between — each taking less than a minute.
“The winner was football,” Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh said.
Roman Wilson’s 18-yard touchdown run on a reverse and a 2-point conversion pulled Michigan within 41-38 with 14:13 left in the fourth quarter.
Future first-round draft pick Quentin Johnston took a short crosser from Duggan and turned it up the sideline for a 76-yard score that put the Frogs up 10.
Duggan threw for 225 yards and two picks and ran for 57. Johnston had six catches for 163 yards and Emari Demercado, picking up the slack for an injured Kendre Miller, ran for 150. All of that against a defense that ranked third in the nation coming in.
TCU finally got a stop and turned it into a 33-yard field goal by Griffin Kell to go up 51-38 with 10:02 left.
After the Frogs and Wolverines combined for 62 points in 20 second-half minutes, the pace was throttled back. But Michigan cut the lead to six with 3:14 left on J.J. McCarthy’s 5-yard TD pass to Wilson.