TCU
TCU vs Kansas football in Fort Worth, Texas on October 21, 2017. (Photo by Gregg Ellman)
TCU was a somber place on Tuesday at mid-morning, what with an overcast sky and temperatures falling into a more comfortable fall feel.
One wondered if Mother Nature might not defy the weather experts with a surprise dip into winter numbers. After all, it was believed since seemingly Abraham was a pup that hell would freeze over before Gary Patterson wasn’t the head coach of the TCU football program.
But, alas, that’s where we are at the most difficult of TCU football seasons since who knows when. Pick an era of TCU football before Patterson arrived. The moral of this sad story has been heard time and again: Nothing lasts forever; all is in flux, nothing stays still.
Not even Patterson — the iconic TCU football leader with a statue on campus — and TCU. Athletic director Jeremiah Donati informed Patterson on Sunday afternoon that the school would make a coaching change at the end of the season. Rather than stay on for the final four games, Patterson said he would leave immediately.
Like any separation, the emotions have run the gamut.
However, there is no time at TCU to either praise (though, of course, they have, as Donati did on Tuesday) or bury the coach. (And it’s fairly obvious, too, that Patterson has no intention of retiring. Donati, in fact, says he told Patterson they needed to act now to cover all the school’s bases and explore all of their options. Patterson said he didn’t want to coach the final four games because he needed to explore all of his options.)
There are things to get done promptly.
That was the message from Donati, who is lugging around the biggest burden of his career, and interim head coach Jerry Kill, who vowed to do his close friend, Patterson, proud in the Horned Frogs’ final four games.
“Last I knew, life isn’t easy,” says Kill, formerly the program’s assistant to the head coach before Sunday’s personnel move. “There are no guarantees. You’ve got to handle adversity. If you don’t, you’re not going to make it in this world. We’ll be fine. We’ll be playing for Gary Patterson the next four weeks. That’s our job. It’s what we need to do.”
Don’t feel sorry for anyone, he says.
“There’s been a lot of emotion, but it’s my job to represent him and TCU," Kill says. "I can’t sit around and be sorry. Is there emotion? Yeah. It’s difficult. It’s a difficult profession. He’d be disappointed if I sat around and felt sorry for myself or for him.”
The guy with the toughest job is Donati. Giving Patterson the news on Sunday was the easiest part of this transition.
Finding a replacement to fill the shoes of TCU’s most successful football coach will be like finding that smallest shard of glass to sweep up.
Donati says the search is under way with potential candidates already being vetted. A small committee has been assembled on campus, made up of staff and members of the board of trustees. Donati didn’t say if LaDainian Tomlinson is on that committee but says he would certainly seek out input from the Pro Football Hall of Famer.
The decision to let Patterson know of the university’s decision with four games to go was prompted by college football’s relatively new Dec. 15 early singing day.
That means a coach and staff need to be in place before then, at least the first of December.
Donati laid out somewhat broad criteria for what the school is looking for.
- Someone who is college head coach. “This job is much different than it was” 25 years ago, Donati says.
- And most importantly: Someone who understands the new world of college football, specifically as it relates to the transfer portal, which has made college athletics akin to free agency in professional sports, and the ever-evolving name, image and likeness — aka, the NIL.
“I really want to hear [a candidate’s] vision of how we can do a better job” with the NIL, Donati says. “The NIL is still evolving. It is going to be very important that the new coach have an NIL strategy.”
One was left wondering if Donati wasn’t also disclosing a big reason TCU decided to take the program in another direction.
In September, Patterson implored boosters to get involved in the new game. How schools will help players profit off the NIL is at the top of recruits’ minds, he said. Some schools, for example, have websites paying players for exclusive interviews.
“We’re going to have to be up and running for my group by the end of November,” Patterson told the assembly, “or I have a chance to lose 25, 30 guys. That’s as plain and simple as I can speak of it.”
That might not have been a message boosters and donors wanted to hear.
It would be, Donati says, “very difficult to fill those shoes. So, it probably feels more natural to go the other way” in a new hire.
There is a belief that that guy could be SMU coach Sonny Dykes, son of Spike, the former Texas Tech coaching legend. Sonny has made an art form of the transfer portal at SMU. One former sportswriter in town swears up and down that the Frogs had Spike Dykes high on a list of potential candidates when coach Pat Sullivan flirted with LSU in the 1990s.
Talk about the butterfly effect. That would have, well, changed everything. If Spike, who wasn’t on the best of terms with his AD at the time, had arrived, there probably would have been no Dennis Franchione, hired by TCU in 1998, who brought Patterson along as his defensive coordinator.
It’s easy to talk about change. It’s a whole ’nother thing to effect it. Like everywhere else, it’s better to be lucky than good.