Conference journey part of TCU’s story
FORT WORTH, Texas — TCU’s football program had quite the conference-hopping journey on its way to the national championship game.
The Horned Frogs won or shared titles in three leagues over 16 seasons after the Southwest Conference disbanded. The small private school was left out when four other Texas schools joined the Big 12 in 1996, too.
“It’s like that old song by Hank Snow, ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ — our fans, they’ve traveled all over the place,” said John Denton, the kicker for the Horned Frogs’ 1984 Bluebonnet Bowl team who has been part of their radio broadcasts since 1988.
They sure have — all the way from the East Coast to Hawaii, with stops in the Western Athletic Conference, Conference USA and the Mountain West Conference before finally getting an invitation to the Big 12 in 2012. They are now the school located the closest to the Big 12’s headquarters in North Texas, after being either the easternmost or westernmost team in other conferences.
The long journey by TCU has taken the third-ranked Frogs (13-1) to a showdown with reigning national champion Georgia (14-0) in the title game Monday night in Inglewood, California. TCU has just more than 10,000 undergraduate students, about one-third the enrollment at Georgia’s main campus in Athens.
The top-ranked Bulldogs of the vaunted Southeastern Conference advanced to the College Football Playoff final by holding off upset-minded Ohio State in Saturday night’s Peach Bowl. That came hours after the Frogs won their semifinal over No. 2 Michigan in the Fiesta Bowl — the game where they were a Bowl Championship Series buster along with Boise State in 2009, a half-decade before the current four-team playoff kicked off.
“We’re focused in on what we’re doing, but we understand there’s been so many great teams that built this program to get to where we are,” said TCU quarterback Max Duggan, the Heisman Trophy runner-up this season. “I’ve had guys from past teams that have been hitting me up and congratulating me, and they’re rooting for us … whether it’s teams back in the Southwest Conference, teams with Andy (Dalton), the 2014 team.”
The Frogs have already matched the school record for wins set by the 2010 team that, with Dalton at quarterback, went 13-0 with a Rose Bowl victory and was No. 2 in the final AP Top 25. That was the middle of three consecutive seasons (2009-11) when TCU didn’t lose a MWC game before going to the Big 12.
Within a month after its Rose Bowl victory, the school had raised the final $30 million needed for a $165 million rebuild of the Frogs’ Amon G. Carter Stadium. Both fundraising and enrollment increased, helping set up their major conference move. That was also during a span when they had accepted an invitation to join the Big East, though they never played in the predominant basketball league that no longer sponsors football.
After the Southwestern Conference dissolved, TCU initially was part of the Western Athletic Conference, then a 16-team league that is now less than half that size and playing in the Football Championship Subdivision after an eight-season hiatus that ended in 2021. Then came four seasons in C-USA before four outright MWC titles in seven seasons.
TCU bottomed out at 1-10 in 1997, the second season after the SWC, before Dennis Franchione was hired and the Frogs finished his debut season with a victory over Southern California in the Sun Bowl when running back LaDainian Tomlinson was a sophomore. The following season, Tomlinson set an NCAA record with a 406-yard rushing game, and led the nation with 2,158 yards as a senior in 2000 before beginning an NFL career that led to his Pro Football Hall of Fame induction in 2017.
When Franchione left for Alabama at the end of the 2000 season, defensive coordinator Gary Patterson succeeded him and won a school-record 181 games before his departure with four games left in the 2021 season. The Frogs had 11 seasons with at least 10 wins overall under Patterson and top-10 finishes in the AP poll six times over a 10-season period through 2017, when the Frogs played in their first Big 12 title game.
There was no Big 12 title game when the one-loss Frogs shared the regular-season crown with Baylor in 2014, the first season of the four-team CFP. The Frogs dropped from third to sixth in the final CFP rankings, missing the inaugural playoff even after ending their regular season with a 55-3 win over Iowa State.
The Frogs now have a chance to win their first national title since quarterback Davey O’Brien and the 1938 team went 11-0 to finish No. 1 for the only the third title in the AP poll era.
“It’s a big deal. You could make arguments that this team should have played for a national championship one more time, potentially two more times before this,” first-year coach Sonny Dykes said. “The landscape of college football has changed, and I think the perception of the Big 12 has changed. Still probably not what it needs to be, but it’s better.
“And I think all of that allowed us to get in the playoff, and then it was up to us to do something with that opportunity.”
“I’ve had guys from past teams that have been hitting me up and congratulating me, and they’re rooting for us … whether it’s teams back in the Southwest Conference, teams with Andy (Dalton), the 2014 team.”
— TCU QUARTERBACK MAX DUGGAN