One of Texas Christian University’s most ardent alumni is noted author/sportswriter/pebble-in-Tiger-Woods’-shoe Dan Jenkins. Old enough at 85 to have lived through Horned Frog glory days, once a member of the TCU golf team, Jenkins takes great pleasure in the rebounding fortunes of his favorite team.
A quick Q&A with the author of such works as “Semi-Tough,” “Dead Solid Perfect,” and “The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate”:
Q: Has coach Gary Patterson returned TCU to the level of prominence that you knew in your youth?
Jenkins: Gary Patterson has taken TCU back to the glory days of the '50s when Coach Abe Martin produced five Top Ten teams and All-Americans like Jim Swink — runner-up Heisman, should have won it — and tackle Bob Lilly.
Patterson has put TCU in more bowl games than Dutch Meyer and Abe Martin combined. He hasn’t matched Dutch’s two national championship in the ’30s with Sam Baugh and Davey O’Brien, but he’s produced eight seasons of 11 wins or more and one 13-0 when the Frogs won the Rose Bowl game over Wisconsin and wound up No. 2 behind Auburn and whatever number of players the Tigers had to actually attend a class.
Q: Where does TCU fit today in the crowded landscape of college football in Texas?
Jenkins: Patterson's teams represent the Third Era of TCU glory years. The Frogs are Texas Football Royalty again, taking a back seat to no one, including the University of Texas.
Q: What are your feelings about going to the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl rather than being included in the four-team college playoff?
Jenkins: I think everybody around here is excited to be going to the Peach Bowl. They feel like it's part of the playoff system since Ole Miss and TCU were both in the mix for so many weeks.
Ohio State was as deserving as TCU and Baylor, based on its record. I just wish (ESPN analyst and former Ohio State player) Kirk Herbstreit hadn’t benefited from such a prominent platform to campaign for the Buckeyes.
Q: Hypothetically, how do you think TCU would have done against any of the playoff teams? How would the Horned Frogs fit in with the traditional powers?
Jenkins: I believe TCU could have held its own against the Four Chosen Ones. The Frogs had a very good combination of offense and defense in this age of no defense at all.
Anyone who thinks TCU doesn’t have an illustrious football history obviously has a memory that doesn’t stretch further back than Lady Gaga, so there’s no point in having a conversation with them. That’s if they’re capable of speech as well as texting.
Q: Sammy Baugh and Davey O'Brien starred at TCU. You invented another semi-star in Billy Clyde Puckett, the former TCU quarterback who was a central character in "Semi-Tough" (played by Burt Reynolds in the movie). How does current TCU QB Trevone Boykin fit into that royal line?
Jenkins: I have vivid boyhood memories of seeing Sam Baugh and Davey O'Brien play for TCU, and I ran with Billy Clyde Puckett in and out of numerous saloons. I am fully prepared to pronounce Trevone Boykin the third greatest quarterback in Frog history.
Q: Given the SEC bias around here, I'm assuming a lot of folks believe Ole Miss should win just on the credentials of the conference. Your prediction?
Jenkins: I'm well aware that the SEC has no respect for any other conference — there was a time when the old Southwest Conference felt the same way and stacked up the national championships to prove it. One of the college football websites I visit has predicted that Ole Miss will win the Peach Bowl 38-17. This pleases me because this website during the regular season predicted that TCU would lose to Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kansas State and Texas.
I think if the Frogs play well and don’t turn it over, they’ll win because they have more speed and more weapons, but it’ll probably be up to the zebras to decide things. They do it far too often.
Q: You coming in for this game?
Jenkins: Yes, I will be at the game. We've progressed to where we now have our share of rich guys with private jets. The missus and I will be among the passengers and will spend three joyous days in one of my favorite cities.
Horned Frogs seldom venture east in bowl season, but these are disorienting times all across the college football ecosystem.
And while they scarcely knew the way to Atlanta, the Texas Christian Horned Frogs — first-ever delegates of the Big 12 to perform in a Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl — nevertheless found the high road and traveled it en masse all the way from Fort Worth to the Georgia Dome.
The head Horned Frog — actually the lead lizard if we are being biologically correct — pretty much insisted on such a path.
“If I go out and blast (the new College Football Playoff system), then my kids are going to do it, my fans are going to do it,” TCU head coach Gary Patterson said. “We just needed to do it a different way.
“Our past has taught us at TCU to have a little different perspective. We’ve never been inside the circle. We’ve always been the kid who drew the short sticks. As a program, I think that makes us stronger in some ways. We’re not very spoiled in the rest of it, thinking we have ownership in it. We just have handled it different.”
One week, TCU was third in the CFP rankings. The next, following a 52-point victory over Iowa State, it was sixth, out of the four-team championship playoff and Peach Bowl-bound. It meets Ole Miss on Wednesday afternoon.
TCU, a small school represented by a little-known beast — “There used to be millions of (horned frogs) roaming around Texas, some big as Yorkies; and they were mean (sons of guns),” said noted writer and TCU alum Dan Jenkins — was the unpopular freshman who got blackballed during fraternity rush.
Ohio State, with an enrollment more than six times that of TCU’s 8,600, vaulted into the playoffs on that last week of the season. The Horned Frogs could have played the victim, the little guy steamrolled by “The System.” They could have come to Atlanta as bent out of shape as Charles Barkley’s golf swing.
Instead, they went all reasonable on us, depriving an angry world of another rant. Pay attention Washington: “Somebody has to start being positive, whether it’s politics or anything else,” Patterson said.
Frog center Joey Hunt was at home in El Campo, Texas, sitting down to lunch when the final playoff rankings were announced with great pomp and ceremony.
“My parents were real disappointed. I was disappointed at first, but I knew there was nothing we could do about it,” Hunt said. “I got over it pretty quick. I knew we were going to play a really talented team. You couldn’t change anything, we did what we could do in our last game, we won significantly and it just didn’t work out for us.”
So, OK, pass the brisket, please.
“You have no choice, you can’t go to a bowl and get beat because you’re worrying about the playoffs. You let it go,” safety Sam Carter said.
They’ll reside in the heart of SEC country for a week, paint Peachtree a little bit purple, engage in a tasty matchup of two top-10 teams, match its 46.8-points-a-game offense (second in the country) against the country’s stingiest scoring defense. And then they’ll go back home and call it a season well done.
There is a practicality born of being a small private school under Patterson, whose 14 seasons at TCU make him the fourth-longest tenured coach in big-time college ball, that keeps gnawing on the ankles of the big ‘uns.
You can hear that in the coach’s philosophy on recruiting to his lower-profile institution: “You sit in a state where they had 350 D-I scholarship offers go out last year. We only have to get our 20 to 25. You can let the top 100 go and I’ll take the next 100 and pick 15 out of those.”
The Horned Frogs adapt and survive. No sure thing out of high school, quarterback Trevone Boykin this year finished fourth in the Heisman voting. Paul Dawson was a wide receiver coming out of high school and an All-American linebacker today.
Even a long-serving coach has to be open to evolution. The defense-leaning Patterson went all hurry-up/spread offense this season, leaving the details to a new offensive coordinator and quarterback coach/co-coordinator. Keeping up with the neighbors in the Big 12 required the coach to take at least three giants steps outside his comfort zone.
“You have to grow your football teams up,” Patterson said.
There is a pride about TCU’s rise to prominence that is not dependent upon endorsement from some playoff committee. That you can hear that in a safety’s comfortable relationship with his school’s scale.
“You should always play with a chip on your shoulder,” Carter said. “Fortunately it’s always on our shoulder because everyone always thinks TCU is a small school, that we don’t have enough top-name guys. It’s fun being the underdog.”
Or in the good-natured accounts of a Horned Frog kicker from the 1980s who is now doing radio for the team.
“When I played there, we were everybody’s homecoming opponent. We were welcomed with open arms. That’s changed,” John Denton said.
“A lot of larger schools know what to expect of us now. Texas (the Goliath of the football-rich state) looks at us as a serious headache. Not sure if they really see us as a threat, though.”
Long before there was a Throwin’ Trevone Boykin at TCU, there was Slingin’ Sammy Baugh (1934-36). There is a Heisman Trophy on display thanks to Davey O’Brien (1938). It claims a couple national championships from that same distant era. You’ll note that those clippings have a Dead Sea Scroll kind of age to them.
The Horned Frogs have been good, very good. And bad, very bad (going to just one bowl game between 1965 and 1994). They have been wandering waifs, belonging to five different conferences between 1995 and 2012. They have pretty much decided that where they are now is a happy place.
TCU is making its first bowl trip east of the Mississippi since 2000. It gets a big payday and a nice matchup and a chance to campaign in the capital city of the SEC for the presence of palatable football beyond its borders. All in all, not a whole lot of reasons to feel slighted.
Who knew? A Horned Frog can smile.
