LOS ANGELES – It's convenient to give No. 3 TCU the Cinderella crown no matter what happens in the College Football Playoff championship against No. 1 Georgia on Monday at Sofi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif.
That oversimplifies what really happened in Fort Worth, Tex. TCU's journey from the defunct Southwest Conference featured cross-country stops across the WAC, Conference-USA and Mountain West – and nearly the Big East until the Horned Frogs found a home in the Big 12. It is a Texas-sized tale to be sure.
This is the story of how you build a college football contender that does not have a royal bloodline. This does not happen with one magic moment.
"The key word is commitment," TCU play-by-play announcer Brian Estridge told Sporting News. "Obviously there is a financial commitment, but there has to be an emotional commitment, too. I don't think every place has it. The alums at TCU — and I'm not one but I'm around them all the time — the alums have made that emotional commitment. It means something to them. They want it to excel at a high level.
"The roots run deep," Estridge continued. "It's not lipstick on a pig. It is a truthful, hard-working deep-rooted love for the school that gives it a firm foundation."
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Turns out you don't put lipstick on a Horned Frog either. Estridge recalled a moment 60 years after the Horned Frogs' last national championship season in 1938. This was in Dennis Franchione's first season ahead of TCU's 1998 Sun Bowl matchup against USC. A simple gesture showed that commitment.
"TCU committed to buying a bigger block of tickets," Estridge told Sporting News. "People thought they would. They said, 'Here's a check book. What do we need to get in?' Sometimes, unfortunately, you have to buy your way in. They did."
That helped set off a chain reaction that continues today. The Horned Frogs beat the Trojans 28-19 and won their first bowl game since the 1957 Cotton Bowl. That revived a program that was mostly-dormant in the Southwest Conference era, and the next step was attracting players.
LaDainian Tomlinson played in that Sun Bowl before evolving into a superstar the next two seasons. He rushed for 5,387 yards and 56 TDs and finished fourth in the Heisman Trophy voting in 2000. Tomlinson was one of six players drafted in the 2001 NFL Draft. The Horned Frogs have had 49 other players drafted since. Cornerback Tre'Vius Hodges-Tomlinson, Tomlinson's nephew, won the Thorpe Award. That brought legacy
"He's been a great mentor in any life and a great guy," Hodges-Tomlinson said. "He's got me in the right way and making sure throughout my career I continue to stay consistent."
Consistency is what Gary Patterson brought to the program though the level-up process to the Power 5. Patterson took over for Franchione, who left for Alabama, at the end of the 2000 season. Patterson had a pair of 10-win seasons in the WAC from 2001-04 before dominating in the Mountain West Conference with a 77-13 record from 2005-11. This is when TCU emerged as one of the three preeminent BCS busters along with Boise State and Utah. By 2010, Sonny Dykes was starting his first head coaching job at Louisiana Tech. Like the rest of the nation, Dykes did not truly grasp what was going on at TCU at the time.
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"I was pretty knee-deep in college football," Dykes said at Media Day on Saturday. "I'm not sure I understood the consistent success that TCU had. I was doing my own thing and I was working. For whatever reason it didn't seem like TCU might have been the biggest story in college football, but they probably deserved to be just because the team is really strong; really consistent. (They) won a lot of big games."
TCU took advantage of the big-stage games. Boise State beat the Horned Frogs 17-10 in the Fiesta Bowl after the 2009 season – a battle of unbeatens that were cast aside by Alabama and Texas in the BCS championship discussion. That was a small part of the ground-work for the present-day four-team playoff.
The Horned Frogs heated that up by winning. In 2010, Andy Dalton led a 13-0 season that culminated in a 21-19 victory against Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl. TCU pushed back when Ohio State athletic director E. Gordon Gee said they played the "Little Sisters of the Poor" by putting up a billboard in Columbus, Ohio, that read: "Congratulations TCU for their BCS Rose Bowl victory – Little Sisters of the Poor."
"You dress for the job you want, not the one you got," Estridge said. "That's what TCU has always done. They dressed for the job they wanted, and they wanted to be in the Big 12. They try to look the part, act the part and spend the money the right way."
The Horned Frogs joined the Big 12 just in time for the College Football Playoff era, but the battle for top-level respect continued. TCU was bypassed by Ohio State in 2014. TCU responded by drilling Mississippi State 42-3 in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl. When you see all those big-game victories, then the 51-45 victory against No. 2 Michigan in the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl is less surprising.
That, however, was a product of letting go of Patterson at the right time. TCU had a 21-22 record from 2018-22. It would have been just as easy to slide into the back half of the Big 12 pecking order, especially with the onset of the transfer portal and Name, Image and Likeness. Now, with Texas and Oklahoma leaving for the SEC, TCU is in position to become the top program in the conference.
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"That shows your level of the expectation," Estridge said. "To be able to make that change, to say, 'We're not where we need to be when we put that much money and emotion into it – we've gotta be better.' They made it, and it paid off."
TCU hired Dykes away from rival SMU, and the early returns have been astounding. The Horned Frogs were picked to finish seventh in the Big 12, but they have put 25 years worth of lessons into action, even if the script reads like a cheesy-sports movie with Dykes and quarterback Max Duggan in the starring roles.
Dykes heard the stories from the lean years of the Southwest Conference days that bottomed out in 1997 when the Horned Frogs went 1-10 in the WAC. He had ups and downs from Louisiana Tech to Cal, but he also had a vision for the program.
Duggan, a three-year starter who didn't win the starting job in fall camp, re-took the starting job when Chandler Morris was injured in the opener.
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The Horned Frogs beat four straight ranked opponents in October, starting with a 55-24 victory against Oklahoma. Griffin Kell's mad-dash for a last-second field goal against Baylor preceded a one-score victory against Texas.
TCU answered for the overtime loss against Kansas State in the Big 12 championship in the thriller with Michigan. Oklahoma, Texas and Michigan are three of the top-six programs all-time in total wins. TCU upset all of them to get to this spot. The fan-base is on board and they brought the Hypnotoad along for the ride.
"You started seeing more signs around the city," Hodges-Tomlinson said. "You start seeing people, you know, TCU flags in their cars and stuff like that. You start seeing people come out to our practices and you know just people being there for us and people start noticing, I go into Target, and I ain't even got to have a TCU shirt on (to be recognized). As a whole, man, you know, becoming somebody in your community, man, it's been amazing."
More financial commitment followed that success. The Horned Frogs announced a $40 million upgrade in facilities in December. Dykes was named the Coach of the Year by several outlets, including Sporting News. On Saturday, he accepted the Eddie Robinson Coach of the Year Award.
Duggan, meanwhile, finished second in Heisman Trophy voting behind USC's Caleb Williams. From the inside, Duggan knows the real story at TCU.
"I guess in our eyes for our program, I guess we don't really see it as a Cinderella story," Duggan said. "We believe in ourselves and we feel like we've earned this position.
"Yeah, we know that we haven't won a national title since 1938, but we've had so many great teams prior in those years," he said. "We've had a lot of great years of football and a lot of teams that have built up this program to get us to this point."
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It is a long-term process, but few would have guessed TCU would be in position to claim a national championship against Georgia on Monday. It was a collection of moments that led to this magical season.
"It gives hope to everybody," Dykes said. "I think that's the great thing about our team this year. When you look at what we've been able to do. Schools that haven't been the traditional powers historically can look and say, 'Hey we can do this.' ... I think that they're right. I really do believe it comes down to teeing it up and playing on Saturday. Sometimes the size of your stadium has no impact on that. Sometimes the budget has no impact on that. Sometimes how the team performed in 1960 has no impact on that."
Most of the time it does, however, and TCU has made the commitment to make that happen – even if it happened faster than expected under Dykes. Now, they will be expected to do it again.
That is no fairy tale. It's an old-school American legend.
