In the third quarter of Saturday night’s game between Texas Christian and Oklahoma, with TCU trailing by a manageable 23-13, Horned Frogs quarterback Foster Sawyer heaved a throw downfield right into the arms of Sooners safety Ahmad Thomas. Trevone Boykin, who had thrown 29 touchdown passes and accounted for nearly 3,500 yards in the air in a Heisman Trophy-worthy campaign before injuring his ankle in the previous week’s victory against Kansas, might have done better.
On the next drive, Oklahoma running back Samaje Perine took the ball, shed a tackler and sprinted for a 72-yard touchdown. Safety Kenny Iloka might have made a play on Perine — had he not sustained a season-ending knee injury in September.
TCU scored 16 unanswered points in the fourth quarter and might have gone up a point with less than a minute left had a pass by the third-string quarterback, Bram Kohlhausen, on the 2-point conversion attempt not been batted down by Sooners safety Steven Parker.
Instead of all the would-have-beens, TCU lost 30-29. The team that began the season No. 2 in the FBS fell to 9-2 and 6-2 in the Big 12.
The game was a fitting apotheosis to a star-crossed season, said Dan Jenkins, the sportswriter who is a personification of Texas football and has been a TCU fan since age 7, when the Horned Frogs went 12-1 with the future Redskins great Sammy Baugh at quarterback.
“All along, I predicted 9-3 or 8-4, not to make myself out to be a genius, just a realist,” Jenkins said in an email Sunday.
TCU was the best team in the country last year, he argued, but “this season’s team suffered all the bad luck that last year’s team didn’t.”
The No. 15 Horned Frogs host No. 7 Baylor (9-1, 6-1) on Friday night. That game was to have been the biggest of the season: a rematch of last season’s instant classic, a 61-58 Baylor triumph that became the most-debated game of the season as the College Football Playoff selection committee made Baylor and TCU the first two teams out of the four-team Playoff.
But Baylor needs help this season after losing a game after its first-string quarterback, Seth Russell, was lost for the season to a neck injury. And after Saturday night’s defeat, the Horned Frogs are almost surely out of playoff contention.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, No. 5 Oklahoma (10-1, 7-1) travels to No. 9 Oklahoma State (10-1, 7-1) for the annual Bedlam game. The winner will hope for, well, bedlam from No. 4 Notre Dame and No. 13 Stanford — who play each other Saturday — and the ACC, SEC and Big Ten favorites, lest the Big 12 be locked out for the second year in a row.
But more short shrift for the Big 12 would be logically fitting, since the conference, alone among the so-called Big 5, lacks a championship game — which is what doomed TCU and Baylor last season.
And it would also make sense in a more spiritual sense.
Realignment, in which the richest conferences consolidated in order to maximize football broadcast revenue, diluted everyone else. Yet the Big 12 emerged as the most unnatural league: a marriage between the former Southwest Conference and what had been the Big 8.
Kansas no longer plays series with Colorado, which left for the Pacific-12, and instead rekindled a series with Texas Tech that has much less history. Nebraska, whose annual showdown against Oklahoma was sometimes effectively the national title game, now plays in the Big Ten alongside Michigan and Maryland. Texas A&M’s fighting motto remains “Gig ’Em!” but the Aggies, now of the SEC, no longer get the yearly opportunity to “gig” — that is, to spear flounder, fish or horned frogs.
This is not the Big 12’s fault any more than it is that of any other conference. All agreed to play musical chairs; the Big 12 is just the one without a seat now.
If there was an upside to realignment, it was that it made the pie bigger. After enjoying success a decade ago, Utah, long a midmajor, was invited to join the Pac-12. After traversing three conferences in 10 years, Louisville made its way into the ACC.
And the Horned Frogs, relegated to various midmajors when the Southwest broke up in the 1990s, played so well since 2000 under coach Gary Patterson that they made their way back into the big time, joining the Big 12 before the 2011 season.
Even so, with just 10 teams — and, in Oklahoma and Texas, just two that are considered true blue bloods — some fans of Big 12 teams worry the conference is at a disadvantage no matter what.
“Last season it struck me that the Big 12 may never make the playoffs as long as the measurement will be which teams would be the best TV draw,” Jenkins said. “Sadly, I feel the football playoff future is filled with one team from the Big Ten, two from the SEC, and Notre Dame, if it doesn’t lose more than two games.”
Playoff or no, the games must go on.
“Think I’ll stay home Friday night,” Jenkins said, “and hope the Frogs can hold Baylor under 100.”
