TCU quarterback Max Duggan took the podium after last month’s Big 12 championship game puffy-eyed and despondent. The Horned Frogs had just lost in overtime to Kansas State, 31–28, ending their chance at a perfect season and creating a night of doubt around whether they would end up in the College Football Playoff.
At times, he struggled to make it through the press conference.
“I think since my four years I’ve been here, there’s been a lot of lows, at least in a football career,” Duggan said. “And then to be so close to bringing this school and this university a championship, the seniors on this team have been through a lot. I think that’s what hurts the most. You’ve been so down before, so low—to get so close and fall short, I think that’s where [the emotion] is coming from.”
Duggan took responsibility for a loss that no reasonable person would pin on him. His high school baseball coach, Lee Toole, says he watched “in awe at how he was playing and the effort he was giving.” It’s the same as what he saw on the diamond. Kevin White, a Duggan family friend, and former sports writer in Duggan’s hometown of Council Bluffs, Iowa, has also seen that emotion.
“They brought him in as a sophomore in an extra-inning game to pitch and he gave up a walk-off homer to lose the game,” White says. “He was a kid that had already established himself, so everybody knew who he was and he obviously had a huge career ahead of him. But to see him after that game, he was inconsolable. And I asked him and he said, ‘It's just because of those seniors, that was the end of their high school career,’ and he thought he was responsible for them ending that career.”
There are many ways in which the star quarterback is unique. He eschewed football scholarship offers to bigger programs in order to attend TCU. He returned from emergency surgery after a health screening revealed he was born with a heart condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. When Gary Patterson, the coach with which Duggan committed, was fired at the end of last season, the quarterback stayed.
When he was benched to start the regular season, he didn’t shut it down to finish his career as a graduate transfer in 2023. Instead, he stuck with the program and regained his job. But in an era of youth sports, where specialization runs rampant with athletes as they grow up, Duggan stands out for how he was raised to always seek out competition. He played four sports in high school: football, basketball, baseball and track, and they inform the athlete and the man he is today.
Duggan’s mother, Deb, was a collegiate hurdler at South Dakota—so athleticism runs in the family. Duggan made an impact as a freshman, competing in the hurdles and high jump, but focused on the 100, 200, and 400 and relays as he got older. Plenty of football players run track in their spare time, but they aren’t typically quarterbacks. When you match the speed with Duggan’s determination, you get plays like this from his high school football days where he runs down an interceptor at full stride 40 yards away, which his father Jim said at the time was the best play of his high school career, coming near the end of the last game of his prep tenure:
You also get his dual-threat ability, on full display in that game against Kansas State.
There's an alternate reality where his fans are cheering him on in the College World Series, rather than the College Football Playoff. Toole says he could have gone on to play college baseball, and a former opposing baseball coach told White, "I'm glad he didn't go out for baseball as a senior because when he was a sophomore he hit a home run that’s still going." Even Jim admitted that Max’s best sport was actually baseball. But Jim played football at South Dakota as well and was Max’s head coach on the gridiron at Lewis Central, so Max was destined for football greatness.
“I always explained to him, listen, you know what? You're never going to be insulated from criticism, so we're going to have to probably use you as an example way more often than anybody else,” Jim says. “Just because I didn't want anybody to ever think that he was being treated in a different way. So, I was pretty hard on him. We had some other coaches that had kids on the team too, and they treated him the same way, and the rest of the kids, they knew that. The reality was Max understood there was a different set of expectations for him with regard to toeing the line.”
As for which sport Duggan was worst at, his basketball coach, Dan Miller, admits it was the hardwood, but much of that is due to the fact that he couldn’t put all of his time into things. Baseball is played in the summer in Iowa, whereas the start of basketball overlaps with the end of football. Miller remembers his court vision and his passing skills, which are borrowed from the football field.
“The thing about Max was in basketball, just like in football, he played with such determination and execution wise, he was wise beyond his years as far as his ability to execute a game plan,” Miller says. “You could put him on the other team's best player and that guy wasn't going to score. He just always made the right plays. The hustle plays, the 50-50 balls. He could finish and transition, obviously. He was just someone that we couldn't take off the floor even though it wasn't his best sport, which you can't say that about a lot of guys.”
Throughout his career, all four of his coaches point to his competitiveness and his hatred of losing, whether it was in track practice, where he went at it daily with one of the other best runners on the team, or on the baseball diamond, where Toole says he once hit a home run in the seventh inning to tie a game he’d later end with a walk-off in extra innings. Jim says there is no substitute for competition, a philosophy that the coaches at Lewis Central share.
Max still has the drive and is still a terrible loser. It’s what he learned in Council Bluffs, on the diamond, hardwood, track and football field. Nobody from there is surprised to see where he is now.
