Being Coach P: Reflecting on 20 Years of Leading TCU

Exhausted, sweat-drenched, embattled, and bruised, the players filed into the locker room at halftime. You can see the sadness on their faces, the kind of sadness you expect to see from a team near defeat. The score was 31-0, and all signs are pointing to a resounding Alamo Bowl loss for the TCU Horned Frogs. 

Hoarse from an evening of screaming, Coach Gary Patterson surveys his near-broken team. In his then-16 years at the helm of the Horned Frogs, Patterson had built a stellar reputation. He had won a Rose Bowl, sent many players to the NFL, sent even more to successful lives, and inched ever closer to a national title. In the process, he established two identities: Gary, the amiable off-the-field presence who could always be counted on for life advice, and Coach P, the intense, loud, game-day persona that could strike fear into opponents and his own players. Gary and Coach P both deserve credit for raising the national profile — and the enrollment — of Texas Christian University. But now, at halftime of the 2016 Alamo Bowl, Coach P’s football team was being utterly embarrassed by the mighty Ducks of Oregon. 

He didn’t get mad; he didn’t scream and shout. Instead, as he stood sentinel over 53 young men in their late teens and early twenties, Patterson talked about family. TCU’s football facility includes a “Bowl Wall”: a chronicle of every bowl game in which the team has ever played. Former players often visit this wall to relive the glory days; current players visit it to see what might be. In the locker room of that brutal bowl game, Patterson wanted his players to think about that wall. He told them to think ahead five, 10, 20 years, to imagine perusing the Bowl Wall with their wives, children, and grandchildren and seeing the 2016 Alamo Bowl forever etched in stone. What did they see, he asked his players. What story were you telling your family? What story do you want to tell your family? 

Zarnell Fitch, one of Patterson’s assistant coaches, remembers that halftime speech with near-vivid clarity. He remembers watching the players as, one by one, their eyes lit up. It was like a scene out of “Friday Night Lights,” and Patterson was the iconic Coach Taylor, rousing his players with the kind of emotional call to action that only the best coaches can muster. 

“The best part,” Fitch says, “is that his players know this is a legacy he’s built. Coach P was the head coach for so many of the bowl games they see on that wall, and now he’s standing in front of them, asking them to be a part of it, too.” 

The speech was a sea change. After listening to their coach talk about the story they could one day tell their families, the Horned Frogs scored 17 points in the third quarter and 14 points in the fourth quarter, tying the game at 31-31. In the first two of three overtimes, the Frogs and the Ducks traded touchdowns and field goals. Then, in a nail-biting, anxiety-inducing third overtime, quarterback Bram Kohlhausen scrambled for an 8-yard touchdown run. With a 47-41 victory, the Horned Frogs laid claim to one of the biggest comebacks in college football history. 

That victory is just one highlight in a career full of them for Coach P (see sidebar). He joined the staff as a defensive coordinator in 1998 and was elevated to head coach in 2000. Since then, he’s compiled 172 wins, six conference championships, and a veritable treasure trove of coaching awards. While the last few years have been a far cry from the glory of the Andy Dalton era, Patterson’s two decades at the helm of TCU football have turned the program and the university into a national power. More importantly, he’s sent hundreds of players — whom he calls “my sons” — onto success after college. To him, that’s the real gift: to work, day in and day out, at building a family. 

When reached for an interview in early June, Patterson was far away from the lights and allure of a big bowl game. He was miles from the sea of 50,000 purple-clad fans at Amon G. Carter Stadium. It was a Saturday morning, and Patterson was doing yard work. Storms from the previous night left a trail of havoc in Fort Worth, and the coach was picking up the pieces. 

The past few weeks hadn’t been easy. A global pandemic altered any hopes he had for a conventional spring football schedule, and the killing of George Floyd incited an anger that was now roiling the nation. In the spring of 2020, he’s been more Gary than Coach P: calm, collected, pensive, and reassuring. He’s had to be. 

“I think the boys and I are going to be all right,” he says, cleaning up a lawn strewn with branches. “Look, the sun’s coming out already.” 

From Kansas to Cowtown 

Rozel (pronounced raw-zelle) is a no-stoplight, western Kansas town an hour and a half from the setting of Truman Capote’s classic book, In Cold Blood. It’s home to roughly 150 people, all of whom know each other. If you Google “Rozel,” you will find droves of stories and videos about decimating tornadoes. “Rozel dodges tornado destruction — again,” one headline reads. You might learn that in 1897, several Kansas newspapers reported that the town had suddenly “dropped out of sight.” (It hadn’t; someone moved a depot.) Eventually, your Googling will turn up some info about a football coach named Gary Patterson. This is where Patterson was born on Feb. 13, 1960. 

“They put a football in my crib,” he says. “I didn’t have much choice in the matter.”

Despite the general dearth of humanity in and around Rozel, Patterson says he grew up surrounded by people: family, friends, teachers, and coaches. It was the kind of town where, for better or for worse, everyone knew everyone’s business. Patterson doesn’t seem to mind it.

“As soon as I cross the state line, I feel comfortable,” he says. “It’s the people that make it that way. Kansas people are unbelievable.” 

Patterson’s father spent his days leveling land so farmers could find irrigation. His mother was a nurse. Gary played the guitar.  

“I was in a band in sixth grade,” he says proudly. “This was before I ran out my voice by barking at football players all day.” 

Yet even as a teenager with rock ’n’ roll dreams, Patterson didn’t dare stray from the family tradition. His uncle Harold is in the football Hall of Fame at the University of Kansas. Uncle Ray played with future Cowboys coach Bill Parcells at Wichita State. So, naturally, Gary Patterson played football.

While the 60-year-old coach is now dwarfed by the defensive giants on his TCU roster, the teenage Patterson was a formidable linebacker, striking fear into the hearts of high school football players across Kansas. His final year on the Pawnee Heights High roster was the final year that the team played 11-man football. After that, Patterson went on to Dodge City Community College, a school he once called “invaluable” in an interview with a Kansas reporter.

“It gave me somewhere to go to school until I knew what I wanted to do,” he said. At the time, Patterson thought he might be a high school coach, perhaps even in Rozel or another small town like his. He filled his days as a Dodge City Conquistador with football practice, football prep and, sometimes, a little guitar. When it came time to move on to a four-year university, the choice seemed obvious: Nearly everyone in his family was a Jayhawk, so why wouldn’t Gary be a Jayhawk, too? But he betrayed them, enrolling at and — worse yet — playing football for the Kansas State Wildcats. 

“My uncle was pretty upset for a while,” Patterson admits. Uncle Harold, that is. 

Patterson graduated from K-State with a bachelor’s degree in physical education and then began a 15-year odyssey that started with a grad assistant stint at his alma mater and included an onslaught of one- and two-year stints in Tennessee, Utah, California, and the Navy.  

“It’s hard to stay in one place as a coach,” Patterson says. “I mean, I love Southern California, but you can’t live there for very long on a coach’s salary.” 

Yet it isn’t the scenery he misses most about past gigs; it’s the relationships he built — and didn’t build.

“When you move, you gotta help yourself,” he says. “When you stay, you get to help others.” 

It was the guitar that got him his first big gig. It was 1986, and Patterson, then a linebackers coach for UC Davis, was working camps with a guy from Cal Lutheran. The two were decompressing from a day’s work, and Patterson was strumming his guitar. The Cal Lutheran coach took a shine to this amateur country crooner from Kansas, and the two struck up a conversation. 

“Would you be interested in becoming a defensive coordinator?” the Cal coach wondered. 

“Yes,” Patterson said. “Yes, I would.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that networking earned Patterson a job at a school that was slightly bigger, slightly more prestigious. Two of Patterson’s early mentors and friends were Dennis Franchione and Jerry Kill, both fellow Kansas boys. Franchione and Kill shared multiple stages with Patterson: Kill currently serves as an assistant on Patterson’s staff and also served as his best man when the ball coach wed in 2004. Franchione gave Patterson his most high-profile gig to date when he stole him away from the Navy and enlisted his defensive talents in New Mexico. It was also Franchione who brought Patterson along for the ride when a school from Fort Worth needed a new man at the helm. 

The year was 1998, and the TCU Horned Frogs had just endured another abysmal 1-10 season in a series of decades filled with abysmal seasons. Franchione was tabbed for the head coaching vacancy, and Patterson became defensive coordinator. The former would turn the program around; Patterson would turn them into a player.  

“Looking back, I think it was time to settle down and stay somewhere for a while,” Patterson says. “It was time to put down roots.” 

Roots and Roses 

The 2011 Rose Bowl was the chance for TCU football to, once and for all, declare that it was no fluke. We’ve arrived, a victory would say, and we’re here to stay.  

There were 94,118 people in attendance, including Gary Patterson’s mom. For the last decade, Mrs. Patterson had watched from Rozel as her son turned the Horned Frogs into a national powerhouse. This game was the culmination of 10 years of 60-hour workweeks in Fort Worth, three decades of sleepless nights and painfully early mornings, and untold hours glued to the TV in tape rooms across America, dissecting every formation and snap. 

The last 10 years included plenty of highlights, but this game could trump them all. More importantly, Gary had built a family in Fort Worth — a family he never wants to let down. 

He wed his wife Kelsey in 2004 and has three children — and that's just his immediate family.

While millions of Americans could turn on their televisions on any given Saturday and find Coach P tearing into a defender for missing a tackle or a lineman for botching a block, few people saw the man’s softer side. 

“We joke that I’m the nice one,” Kelsey Patterson says. “But Gary’s not always the guy you see running up and down the sidelines. He loves the boys.”

“It’s not uncommon for a freshman to say, ‘I don’t like this guy,’” says Mark Cohen, TCU’s director of athletic media relations. ‘He’s intense; he yells too much.’ Their second year, they’ll say, ‘He’s not too bad.’ By years three and four, they can’t imagine life without Coach in their corner. They know he has their backs.” 

At the start of every coaches meeting, be it for a scrimmage or the Rose Bowl, Patterson will ask each coach how the players are doing. How are their grades, he’ll ask. Are we making sure he’s keeping up in class? What about his family? 

In his three years covering Horned Frog football, Star-Telegram reporter Drew Davidson has mostly seen Coach P, the seemingly irascible head coach, stalking the sidelines.

“He’s a tough coach, no question,” Davidson says. “He’s reluctant to praise, and I’ve seen him light into guys.” 

 But Davidson has met Gary, too. 

“It’s clear he cares about these guys,” he says. “You don’t get to be somewhere 20 years without building relationships and trust.” 

Like all great coaches, Patterson built relationships before the players ever set foot on campus. He doesn’t like to talk recruiting strategy (“He plays those cards pretty close to the chest,” Cohen says), but it appears he has a soft spot for players who are overlooked. They might be athletes with a lot of raw potential, or they might be guys from small towns like his. Zarnell Fitch was one of those guys. 

Spencer, Oklahoma, may not be as small as Rozel, Kansas, but it’s still the kind of town you can drive through without noticing it. When Fitch was growing up in Spencer, it seemed like everyone knew Coach Gary Patterson. Patterson was the guy who recruited Spencer running back Ronald Moore back in the 1980s, and since Moore made it to the NFL, both he and Patterson remain household names decades later.

“Gary’s name and what he did for Ronald was big in my community,” Fitch says. “I thought, ‘Hey, if I want to make it to the NFL, maybe he’s my guy.’” 

Yet Fitch decided to enroll at Tennessee. A few weeks into his first college camp, he knew he made a mistake. 

“I should’ve picked TCU,” he says. “It’s where I was supposed to be.” 

Fitch left Tennessee, played JUCO football, and ultimately made his way onto Patterson’s roster in Fort Worth. All those years later, Patterson had remembered that Fitch was interested in coaching. 

“I told him that when he was recruiting me,” Fitch says, still in disbelief. “So, there I am, end of my senior year, and Coach asks me, ‘Hey, what are you doing next year?’” 

Fitch joined Patterson’s staff as a grad assistant, and now, after years of indoor, arena, and NFL football, Fitch has once again returned to Fort Worth. Four years ago, he became TCU’s D-Line coach. 

“Now, I get to be the one having those conversations in small towns, helping Coach P help guys like me,” Fitch says. “I get to be the guy bringing them the dream, telling them they can be a part of this legacy, too.” 

That legacy extends far beyond the football field. In addition to The Gary Patterson Foundation, the ball coach has helped TCU raise its national standing. In 2000, the university received a little more than 5,000 applications for admission. Twenty years later, they consistently rake in 20,000 apps. The number of applications saw a sizable boost in the years after the Rose Bowl as, for the first time, people from the far west began seeing Fort Worth as a viable college destination. 

“We joke that TCU now stands for Texas California University,” Cohen says. “But it’s kind of true: Apart from Texas, the school’s biggest draw is California.”

And it was California where Patterson cemented his status as a TCU icon. The 2010 TCU football team was the stuff of legends, but even though they went 12-0 on the way to the Rose Bowl, fans and pundits still doubted if they were the real deal. No. 4 Wisconsin was their toughest test of the season, and Coach P’s mom wasn’t about to miss it. She, her daughter, and her son-in-law drove 20 hours from Rozel to Pasadena to see Gary and the Frogs in action. 

“They’re very proud of Gary,” Kelsey told reporter Gil LeBreton around the time of the Rose Bowl. “He takes a lot of pride in making [his family] proud of him.”

So, when TCU beat Wisconsin by two points, Patterson thanked, in order, his players, his coaches, and his family. 

“People say, ‘Well, why are you so driven?’” Patterson reflected after the game. “You’re driven because you have parents that drove you, and you want to make sure that you paid them back for all the hard work they did.”

Years later, it was Gary who traveled hundreds of miles to see his mom: She was dying, and Patterson wanted to see her one last time. He would have stayed a couple of days, he told reporters, but his mom knew that he had a game coming up. 

“She was one of those [who said], ‘Now, I don’t want you to get beat by Texas Tech,’” Patterson recalled. She wanted him back with his boys, so she told him to go home to Fort Worth.

Embronzed 

Standing outside Schollmaier Arena is a statue Gary Patterson never wanted to exist — a statue of him. 

“Can it wait until I’ve stopped coaching?” he asked the employees in the athletic department. The answer, ultimately, was “No.” A donor was dying, and it was one of his last wishes to see Coach P embronzed alongside Davey O’Brien and Dutch Meyer. So, the statue went up. 

“Well at least I don’t have to look at it, because I’m not over there that often,” Patterson told colleagues at the time. The statue soon became the butt of an ongoing joke in the athletic department. 

“The athletic director’s office is right behind the statue,” Cohen says. “So, he’s got a great view of Coach P’s rear end.”

Students love the statue. They take selfies with it, and when it rains, they put an umbrella over its head. They love the real-life Patterson, too. Patterson has become something of a celebrity on campus and in Fort Worth. The few fans that weren’t won over by the Rose Bowl were finally wooed when TCU joined the Big 12 in 2012. Now, Patterson is instantly recognized and flagged down whenever he is on campus or out and about in the community. This superstar status would never get to his head, of course. Nor would he let it interfere with his family life. Every Thursday of the regular season after the game plan is complete and the practices are over, he’ll drive to Railhead Smokehouse to record The Gary Patterson Radio Show, then drive to Del Frisco’s for his date night with Kelsey. 

“He’s a nice, friendly guy,” a maître d’ confirms. “Always happy to be here.” 

Lately, however, few people have been around to flag down Coach P. No one has been there to shield the Patterson statue from rain, either. COVID-19 has shut down Fort Worth and shut in Patterson’s football players. Patterson has had more down time than usual, and a few weeks into quarantine, the coach got an idea. He picked up his guitar, grabbed a pen and paper, and wrote a song. 

The tune he crafted, titled “Take a Step Back,” is about a lot of things. It’s about community. It’s about reminding yourself to watch out for the guy next to you and to have your neighbor’s back. But most of all, it’s about family. The music video, released in early June, is a two-minute, 19-second celebration of all things TCU. The camera zooms across a campus brimming with purple and cheer, and in between shots of wild fans, Gatorade dumps, and touchdowns aplenty, there is Gary: strumming his guitar, belting his heart out, and reminding you how important family is. 

He doesn’t talk much about games or stats or any kind of football minutiae, but he can talk about music all day. 

“It’s always been my way to relax,” he says. “Lately, I think we’ve all been needing our own ways to relax a little bit.”

In addition to writing some songs, Patterson has taken this time to think. He thinks about his “sons,” past and present, and how they’re doing amidst the pandemic and weeks of protests. He talks to them often, but not as often as he would like. That’s why, when interviewed in June, Patterson is eagerly counting down the days to the first fall practice. He longs to be back on the field, to keep chasing that elusive national title. Things like 200 wins and 20 years are great, he says, but the job isn’t done until he brings home the ultimate crown. 

“As soon as you think you’ve arrived, you need to get out,” he says. 

That’s why he’s itching for fall camp, no matter what it looks like. When it comes, he’ll wake up, and it’ll still be dark outside. He’ll drive to campus as the sun rises, and once there, he’ll meet with his boys. Then, the family will get to work.   

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Highlights

It’s impossible to beat the Rose Bowl, but the granddaddy of ‘em all isn’t the only great game of Patterson’s tenure thus far. Here are four others. 

‘05 Upset of Oklahoma 

It was the start of the season, and the Horned Frogs traveled to Norman to face the Sooners. The OU squad was ranked No. 7 in the nation and was led by a running back named Adrian Peterson. It didn’t matter: The Horned Frogs shocked Oklahoma, beating the Sooners 17-10 in their own backyard. The game remains one of TCU’s biggest upsets ever, and Coach P pulled it off with a crew that he recruited. 

‘06 Upset of Texas Tech

Led by the nefarious offensive wizard Mike Leach, the Red Raiders were heavily favored to trounce Patterson’s Frogs. Texas Tech typically ran up 50 points on their opponents, but in this game, they scored only 3. After the game, Leach told reporters that his team simply played poorly, to which Patterson retorted, “People have been underselling our kids for years,” he snapped. “All they ever want to do is talk about the Big 12. We’re not the Big 12 — just a Texas team playing with Texas players — and beating every Big 12 team that shows up on [our] schedule.” It would be years before TCU got the respect Patterson believed they always deserved, and they, too, would eventually join the Big 12. 

‘09 Crushing of Utah

For the first time ever, ESPN’s College GameDay came to Cowtown. While the No. 4 Frogs were favored over the No. 16-ranked Utah Utes, some naysayers were still doubting if this school from the Mountain West Conference was worthy of national attention. Patterson’s team responded by putting up 55 points in a dramatic statement win played in front of millions of viewers. 

2015 Upset of Baylor

The sports media loved to hype up the rivalry between these two upstart Texas teams, but Patterson has always downplayed any animosity between the programs. Nevertheless, it must have felt nice to exact some sweet revenge on the No. 7-ranked Bears, who had stunned the Horned Frogs with a dramatic come-from-behind victory the year before. This time, the No. 15 Frogs upset the Bears and finished the year with their best record yet since joining the Big 12. 

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Coach P and Kelsey

The First Lady of TCU Football has made her mark on Fort Worth, too.  

“Kelsey is one of the secrets to our success,” Gary says. “Ask any of the players: She’s the nice one. She’s the good guy.” 

Kelsey grew up in Fort Worth, but she wasn’t always a fan of the city.

“There was nothing to do when I grew up here,” she says. “Maybe you went to the Stockyards, but that was it.”

By her own admission, she didn’t go to any TCU football games growing up. After enrolling at college at UT Austin, she figured she might stay in the capital for a while. But one job led to another, and eventually Kelsey returned to her hometown to be the director of marketing at the Fort Worth Zoo. That’s how she eventually met Gary. 

A guy in the athletic department was married to one of Kelsey’s coworkers, and one day, Kelsey’s colleague started talking about football.

“You need to meet our head coach,” she said. 

“I told her, ‘This feels like a setup,’ and it was,” Kelsey says. “And the rest, I guess, is history.”

The happy couple wed in 2004. Since then, Kelsey's become like an honorary mother to the TCU football team. 

“Everybody loves Mrs. P,” says Zarnell Fitch, a former TCU player and now the team’s D-Line coach. “When we were players, I don’t know if we understood why she would love a guy that yelled at us all the time. But she does.” 

And she loves the community, too.

“Whenever I talk to the players, I always focus on embracing the community,” she says. “Gary didn’t get to build relationships in his earlier jobs, but now that he’s been here so long, we want to make the most of our time here.”

Kelsey’s passion is education, which she focuses on through her and Gary’s foundation (see “Laying a Foundation”). And when she’s not busy leading that organization, she’s relishing her role as “Mrs. P,” the one players know as “the good guy.” Each year, scores of graduates return to meet the current crop of players and hang with the Pattersons. 

“It’s always amazing to have the old guys meet the new guys and see the impact the program can make,” she says. “It’s my favorite day of the year.”

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Laying a Foundation

Gary and Kelsey have already changed the lives of grade-school students across Cowtown.

In the 15 years of town- and job-hopping, Patterson dreamed of settling down. Finding a head coaching job wasn’t as much about the high salary as it was about finding a place he could call his own. So, when he finally found that place, he wanted to help make it better. 

“I have a job because of kids, so I wanted a platform to give back to kids and the community,” he says.

The same year Patterson assumed the role of head coach, he launched The Gary Patterson Foundation, an organization devoted to equity in education. As its mission statement says, the foundation strives to improve schools “one program at a time, one campus at a time, and one child at a time.” In Fort Worth, they have their work cut out for them. 

One of the foundation’s key goals is to get the city’s libraries up to standard. Currently, 84% of Fort Worth’s public schools have libraries that fall below state standards. The Launch into Literacy campaign aims to fix that problem. Launched in 2018, the campaign raised more than $500,000 for library improvement, a far cry from the foundation’s humble beginnings.

“I think our first fundraiser was for the Red Cross, and we ended up raising around $5,000,” says Kelsey Patterson. While the organization bears her husband’s name, even Coach P will admit that his wife is the brains behind the operation. 

“With Coach’s hours, he didn’t have enough time to develop it,” Kelsey says. “I took it over, and the first few years were getting our feet wet, seeing what worked, what didn’t. It took us a few years to home in on what matched our personality.” 

The Super Bowl was their breakthrough. In 2011, the 45th Big Game came to Arlington, and the NFL tried out a philanthropy initiative called SLANT 45 (Service Learning Adventures in North Texas). The Gary Patterson Foundation partnered with George C. Clarke Elementary for a service-learning project, and the two stayed connected long after the Packers beat the Steelers in Jerry World. 

“They became like our test kitchen,” Kelsey says, and through literacy and after-school programs, the foundation determined what worked and what didn’t for students at Clarke and beyond. In quarantine, the Pattersons had more time to work on their organization. But Kelsey is tight-lipped about what lies ahead for the foundation, other than to hint that some major news may be dropping soon. 

“We’re going to try to keep raising the bar,” Kelsey says. “We feel like we have the opportunity to really move the needle on some issues in Fort Worth.”