TCU athletic director Jeremiah Donati, left, and new football coach Sonny Dykes.
All that was missing on Monday as Sonny Dykes and his family stepped out of the helicopter that had delivered them to midfield at Amon G. Carter Stadium was some hosannas, a donkey, and perhaps some incense.
The scene seemed to encroach even on the very loose sanity code of football in Texas, where the game is religion for the most charismatic soul.
And there seemed to be no ceasing with the inspiration on Tuesday for the formal introduction of Dykes as TCU’s new football coach and successor to the prophet Gary Patterson. Not even St. Nick could have made it jollier in the football stadium’s Legends Club & Suites.
But it was there watching all of this unfold that one had a vision of perfectness. How appropriate it all seemed that a boy raised in West Texas was being introduced to an approving audience in the stadium named for the man who declared as only he could that Fort Worth was “Where the West Begins.”
And we were all there fittingly facing Dallas, the city where the east peters out. Well, so says our very own Socrates, Will Rogers.
“He would be very excited,” said Mark Johnson, grandson of Amon Carter and chairman of TCU’s Board of Trustees, laughing at the verbal portrait put before him. “I would think so. The tradition continues.”
From the standpoint of practicality, athletic director Jeremiah Donati said Dykes represented everything TCU was looking for.
- College head coaching experience.
- Detailed plan to recruit Texas with an emphasis on Dallas and Fort Worth.
- Someone with a detailed plan to prevent injury and a high-level strength and conditioning program. To that end, Dykes said, you’re gonna love this guy.
- Someone who has a history of building a team culture on and off the field.
- Someone who will make TCU a competitor for conference championships.
And, above all else, Dykes is a super guy, Donati continued.
A West Texas guy.
It’s worth noting, too, that Amon Carter just happened to be the first chair of Texas Tech’s board of directors. There would be no Texas Tech without Amon Carter. Certainly not when the Legislature planted seeds for a technological college in Lubbock when it did. He is not known to have ever flung a tortilla in joy, however, but Wreck ‘Em — some Horned Frog faithful have another, less enduring play off the mantra — is the alma mater of Dykes.
TCU and Texas Tech are kissing cousins, but let’s not ruin our moment or push our luck.
There is another reality to the hiring of Sonny Dykes: Not all of the Purple People are happy about it, and it has nothing to do with visions of Raider Red. They are certainly not angry like those driving up and down Mockingbird in Dallas. They remain livid at Dykes for packing up his motor home and heading west. No, no. SMU hasn’t had such a distaste for one man since Dale Hansen buried the Mustangs football program alive in 1987.
There are whispers — no, rather proclamations — on social media channels that Dykes isn’t good enough to carry on the program Patterson built with his blood, sweat, and shouting.
Mediocrity is the preferred term. And to support their claim, they use a Howard Taft-size laser pointer to circle Cal Berkeley, Dykes’ only experience in a Power Five conference. However, there’s much more to the story of Dykes’ 19-30 record and three losing seasons over four years, the best record 8-5 with Jared Goff, a future No. 1 overall pick in the NFL Draft, under center.
Dykes’ first order upon taking the job there was not to win games but rather to rebuild the football program’s academic standards, which had slipped under his predecessor Jeff Tedford. Upon arrival, the program was found to have an Academic Progress Rate, a score used by the NCAA to quantify academic success, of 923 with a four-year average of 935, near the cutline for bowl ineligibility. Cal’s graduation rate for student-athletes who enrolled from 2003– 2006 was 46%, the worst of the 72 major-conference programs in the Football Bowl Subdivision (better known as FBS).
As part of stepping up academics, the football team was handed new, more rigorous academic recruiting parameters. That dictate made it more challenging to get guys into school to play football. That’s not to say academics isn’t important in college athletics, but the football field is here, and the debate team field is over there. Like way over there.
Moreover, the athletic director who hired Dykes had moved on. Yet, that new AD, Mike Williams, praised his football coach, saying, Dykes was “doing everything we’ve asked him to do.”
There, of course, is nothing worse for a football coach than to receive a vote of confidence from his boss. As he’s saying it, the boss might also be sharpening up a sword from King Arthur’s round table.
It was the ultimate culture clash, a West Texas guy in Berkeley, California, where the denizens favor trips to Haight-Ashbury over a college football game on Saturday. Toto, we ain’t on the South Plains anymore.
Dykes had gone too far west — where the west meets left field.
Dykes ultimately got fired after season four for interviewing with Baylor for the job that went to Matt Rhule. Williams didn’t deny the reason, either.
“Cal was going to be a longtime rebuild,” Dykes said on Tuesday. “When I took the job, we knew what we were getting into. We knew it was going to be rough. I think TCU’s program is in much different shape. It wasn’t good in the beginning [at Cal]. The thing we did was get consistently better.”
Don’t expect Dykes to be sniffing around for other jobs at TCU.
This West Texas boy seems a perfect fit in Fort Worth. And he should: This is Where the West Begins.
