LOS ANGELES– TCU was 200:1 to win the national championship when the season started.
The Horned Frogs was unranked and an afterthought in the Big 12, where brand names like Oklahoma and Texas have reigned for years.
But TCU, which hasn’t won a national championship in 1938, has come out of nowhere to advance to the national championship game against defending champion Gerogia here at SoFi Stadium, where they have 16:1 odds of winning it all.
Disregard the Frogs at your own risk.
TCU coach Sonny Dykes, has transformed a 5-7 team into a 13-1 monster that won the Big 12 regular season, defeated six ranked teams and beat Big Ten champion Michigan as a touchdown underdog in the national semi-finals at the Fiesta Bowl.
They may be Cinderella, but they refuse the let the clock strike midnight. The private school from Ft. Worth stunned the country with rousing comebacks and upsets against the sport’s blue bloods. They won six games after trailing by double figures in the second half and won three of those games with last second scores. The small private school for Ft. Worth buried Oklahoma under 55 points, in October, won at Texas in November and outscored Michigan. 51-45, shocking the Wolverines’ defense by putting up 528 yards total offense.
“I can’t say I saw this coming,” Dykes admitted. They enter tomorrow’s game against Georgia as a 13 1/2-point underdog.
But Dykes, a failed major college coach at Cal who replaced the legendary Gary Patterson, has made anything look possible in his first year. When you play with a chip on your shoulder.
He transformed talented, but inconsistent quarterback Max Duggan, a four-year starter, into a Heisman finalist with his version of the Air Raid offense derived from his mentors Mike Leach and Hal Mumme, two of the great innovators in an ever-changing sport. Half of the defensive starters transferred in this year from the portal, including hard hitting Johnny Hodges, the team’s leading tackler who transferred from Navy but had no offers before TCU called after an assistant took notice because he had seen Hodges play against Navy while at Tulsa. The others were two- and three-star players he could develop into stars. Then, there was wide receiver Quentin Johnson, arguably the best NFL prospect on the roster who almost left for Oklahoma but stuck around and amassed more than 1,000 year receiving yards, a remade strength and conditioning program and a few season changing breaks.
“We have a lot of guys on this team who are three stars, two stars who didn’t have many offers coming out of high school, so I feel like everyone already had a chip on their should coming in,” said cornerback Tre-Vious Hodges-Tomlinson, who won the Jim Thorpe Award. “It’s time to start taking us serious. We’re not a joke.”
TCU has more talent at the skill positions than people think. Sixth year running back Emari Demardo from nearby Inglewood, five minutes from Sofi who started his career at Saddleback Junior College stepped in for injured workhorse Kendre Miller and rushed for 150 yards against a defense that had only allowed one back all season to rush for more than 100 yards during the regular season.
When TCU beat Texas, 17-10, Nov. 12, the TV cameras caught Patterson telling Duggan he would attend the national championship game if his former team got there. Patterson coached the Frogs to a 12-1 record in the Mountain West in 2014, but the Frogs were left out of the first CFP playoff
Dykes, whose father was a head coach at Texas Tech, convinced Mumme to hire his son as a graduate assistant at Kentucky in1997. Leach hired him to become the co- offensive coordinator at Texas Tech and assigned him to recruit the Dallas-Ft. Worth market. Dykes eventually got head coaching job at Louisiana Tech and Cal, but was fired after by the Pac-12 school after he compiled a 19-30 record in four seasons in 2017 even though he put up significant passing numbers.
He thought about getting out of the business altogether and into real estate before he was hired by SMU that winter. He made an impact in his four years there, winning 25 games in his last three seasons, including beating TCU in consecutive seasons for the first time since 1992-93. The Mustangs finished 8-4 last season, racking up 466.8 yards and 38.4 points per game after an signing an historic recruiting class. They were invited to play in the Fenway Bowl.
And TCU zeroed in on Dykes who beat out Deion Sanders of Jackson State, Clemson offensive coordinator Tony Elliott and Billy Napier of Louisiana.
He turned out to be the right man for the job and solidified the Big 12’s future with Texas and Oklahoma leaving for the SEC in 2024.
If TCU wins, the Frogs, who have 17 blue chip prospects on their roster as compared to four times as many as Georgia, can show college football no one has a lock on winning and offer hope to a lot of schools out there trying to climb the mountain.
“The media wants the blue bloods to win,” Hodges said. “They want the bluebloods to play each other. The schools are bigger — bigger fan bases. That’s what they want. For us, it’s put ourselves on the map, earn some money, put some respect on your family’s name.”
