LAWRENCE, Kansas — On the day when the college football world unexpectedly focused its attention on a place nobody could have predicted before the season, TCU and Kansas delivered a fantastic game and Horned Frogs receiver Quentin Johnston delivered a performance worthy of primetime despite the brunch-hour start.
To say there was a concerted effort to get Johnson the ball Saturday would be an understatement. He finished with 14 catches for 206 yards on 16 targets as TCU pulled out a thrilling 38–31 win with College GameDay in the house. No other TCU pass-catcher had more than four targets, and Johnston’s target share accounted for half of quarterback Max Duggan’s non-intercepted passes.
“Number one, he was healthy. He had a couple games where he probably wasn’t healthy,” Horned Frogs coach Sonny Dykes said of his team’s leading receiver after the game. “It goes back to practice. I know that’s kind of the lame answer and nobody wants to hear that, but he just had such a great week of practice, and Max threw him the ball over and over in practice and he made plays.
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“I think the two of those guys felt the connection and felt like we had a matchup in some of the things that they were gonna do defensively and we needed him to have a big game.”
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Johnston entered Saturday’s showdown, which pitted two Big 12 unbeatens, with only nine catches on the season. The Frogs certainly got the breakout they were looking for.
“At the end of the day if you love football, you’re gonna go get it every single day, day-in and day-out,” Johnston said. “Every day since the summertime I’m full speed, my little [wearable] GPS thing is off the chart. That’s just more of a battle between me and myself trying to get better everyday not really worrying about what everyone else is talking about, just doing it for me and then calling my mom and them and going, ‘Look I’m going harder for y’all.’ That’s my motivation of why I keep going.”
As a lanky 6’4” wideout, TCU put Johnston in some interesting positions and found different ways to just get him the ball. That included a drive in which he accounted for 83 of the Frogs’ 99 yards to move the team down the field at lightning speed on three straight plays.
First it was as an inside receiver, showcasing how good he is exiting the catch and running away from defenders:
Then as an outside guy with again far too much space to operate:
And finally catching this tap pass while exhibiting that the Frogs aren’t scared to just give Johnston the ball and let him try to make a play with it.
“We kinda made it a priority to target him and look at him,” said Duggan. “Whether that’s scheming up plays to get him the ball or just tagging him on things to get him the ball quickly and see what he can do, that was kinda my mindset in practice just to target him and look at him more often.”
Duggan admitted it’s “not too fun” to throw out of his own end zone. But it’s certainly a joy to throw into it when a target like Johnston is there to make catches like this.
“Ran the play earlier and got a different coverage, then what we got right there,” Duggan said. “They were pretty much manned up on [Quentin] and the safeties were low. … He did a great job on his [route] stem of giving me room in the back of the end zone and he makes a tremendous catch.”
The touchdown put a capper on a wild second half that featured 56 combined points after only 13 in the first two quarters. The Horned Frogs needed every bit of this offensive effort to beat what multiple members of the TCU program called a good football team on the other side. Even without QB Jalon Daniels, who went down with an apparent shoulder injury in the second quarter, Kansas backup Jason Bean played well enough to give the Jayhawks an opportunity to drive for the win. Kansas coach Lance Leipold said after the game he’s unclear about the extent of Daniels’s injury.
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Coming into the 2022 season, TCU had a projected win total of 6.5 by the oddsmakers, hinting that a postseason berth would be quite an achievement for this team. But the Big 12 is shaping up to be perhaps the deepest league in all of Power 5, without a clear-cut top team. If Oklahoma isn’t going to achieve its College Football Playoff heights after a drubbing at the hands of Texas, and Kansas is no longer a reliable win for anyone, then this really is any team’s conference.
TCU is more than just a pleasant surprise; after a 5–0 start and two straight wins to open league play, the Frogs share an early lead in the race. Who’s to say they won’t still be there at the end?
