South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Frogs stay perfect with another splash
No. 7 TCU pulls away for 9-0 in victory against Texas Tech
FORT WORTH, Texas — Max Duggan and the TCU Horned Frogs are learning to play with a perfect record that makes them playoff contenders.
That’s the view of first-year coach Sonny Dykes, who watched his team pass another test Saturday.
Derius Davis returned the first punt 82 yards for a touchdown, Kendre Miller ran for the go-ahead score early in the fourth quarter and TCU, ranked No. 7 in the College Football Playoff rankings, pulled away in a 34-24 victory over Texas Tech.
Davis caught one of Duggan’s two fourth-quarter TD passes as the Horned Frogs reached 9-0 for the first time since
2010, a 13-0 season that ended with a Rose Bowl victory and No. 2 national ranking.
The Big 12’s No. 1 offense in yards didn’t get its first touchdown until the fourth, and TCU has trailed in the second half of four of its six conference victories.
“Despite everybody in the program kind of doing everything we can do to preach the one-game-at-a-time thing, I think there are times our players start to see the enormity and gravity of things,” Dykes said. “It starts with us as a coaching staff and just making sure our guys feel free.”
The Red Raiders (4-5, 2-4) went ahead 17-13 in the third quarter on Tyler Shough’s 33-yard touchdown pass to J.J. Sparkman, but ended up falling to 2-4 against ranked teams in coach Joey McGuire’s first season.
“Frustrating game because we have the lead,” McGuire said. “Just got to make plays to win the game.”
The previous perfect run for TCU came in the Mountain West Conference and was before the College Football Playoff.
The nine-game winning streak is the longest since the Horned Frogs won 16 straight spanning the the 2014-15 seasons. In 2014, one-loss TCU had joined the Big 12, but was left out of the first four-team CFP.
“Our deal is let’s just try to figure out a way to win a game and then at the end of the year, we’ll sit down and see what we have to do,” Dykes said. “I think the way we’ve tried to approach this has served us well.”
Defensive standout Tyree Wilson made the first big play for Texas Tech with a fourth-down tackle for loss when TCU was driving up 7-0 after Darius’ return up the right sideline and back toward the middle.
Wilson, though, sparked the Horned Frogs’ go-ahead drive with a facemask penalty when his sack of Duggan would have put TCU in third and long.