The question is the same, “What’s changed?”
TCU players and coaches publicly dance around the answer, for the right reasons.
What they say in private sounds different than what they say in public. Justifiably.
Because the answer is Gary Patterson.
In some way everyone within TCU’s athletic department, and the football team, owes Patterson a measure of gratitude for the job he did while acknowledging his exit was the one that was needed.
This includes the new head coach.
It’s been nearly a year since GP “resigned” as the head coach of the TCU football program. The announcement, which happened on Halloween night, was painful, awkward, sad, and, ultimately, necessary.
Fears that TCU would fall into college football’s crevasse without Patterson and become an FCS team were reasonable, but the opposite has happened.
Those who criticized the move now celebrate.
With nearly the same team that finished 5-7 last season, the Horned Frogs are currently 6-0 overall, 3-0 in the Big 12, ranked No. 8 in the nation and will host No. 17 Kansas State on Saturday at Amon G. Carter Stadium in a prime time game at 7 p.m.
Patterson’s exit is not the only reason why this program has flipped. It’s also not a coincidence.
Since he left the program after the 2021 season, staffers privately have come out of the rafters to tell even more “Gary stories” that they kept quiet for years in exchange for winning football seasons and job security.
The same for boosters and alums.
The closest anyone has come publicly to saying negative of note came from running back Kendre Miller, who after the team’s win over Oklahoma said that the discipline is much better.
That was an unintentional but direct hit on a perception about the state of the team under the previous coach that was all about old school discipline but in recent seasons had become anything but.
In the last five or six years, word had permeated throughout the program that if the player could sidestep his position coach and reach the head coach the answer was going to be YES.
If it went wrong, then the position coach had hell to pay.
Players and staffers had a hard time listening to messages of accountability while former TCU running back Zach Evans brazenly skirted the rules and pretty much did whatever he wanted.
TCU staffers publicly pretended to try to re-recruit the talented but immature back for another season, but privately said “Thank God,” when he announced he was transferring to Ole Miss.
This is one example. There are others.
Gary still lives in his home in Fort Worth, about two miles from his old office, while he works as an assistant on head coach Steve Sarkisian’s staff at the University of Texas. UT is 5-2, ranked No. 20 in the nation, and the defense is playing well.
Patterson will always be welcome at TCU, and in coming years he will no doubt partake in reunions of his previous teams.
It’s still an odd sight, watching Gary Patterson walk up and down a sideline in a white shirt with a burnt orange Longhorn logo on his visor.
Patterson is making it no secret he would like to be a head coach again, and a school would be wise to at least consider him as a candidate. He’s a young 62, and his exit from TCU was needed for both parties.
He had been in the same place for more than 20 years, made generational wealth, and keeping it all together with the same intensity is just about impossible. In the rapidly changing world of ... well, everything, it’s hard to conceive a tenure will ever last this long again in major college football.
Patterson is not an idiot, and if he can accept the new world of major college football, he will be successful. If he wants to — he may just be happy calling defenses.
In the last few months it’s become readily apparent that too much of the state of the TCU football program had not changed enough in the last seven or eight years, and it finally showed up in the record.
As evidenced by their 6-0 start, the talent was not necessarily the problem.
The problem had become the players didn’t much like the program any more, and the performance suffered.
Coaches like to call it “buy in.” Whatever Gary was selling, the players were no longer buying.
New coach Sonny Dykes owes something to Gary for helping him resurrect his career. Gary hired Dykes as an offensive analyst in 2017, and Sonny was hired by SMU to be its head coach the following season.
Dykes is not going to say anything about Patterson publicly other than, “Thank you.”
At this point, that’s what they all need to say.
There is no reason to publicly say anything else, even if the answer to the question of “What’s changed” really only has one answer.
