Believe Dan Jenkins. Believe that the time has come to take off the jerseys and look into the hearts of the guys who play down the street. Believe in TCU.
"If they beat Utah," said the man who has been an inspiration to a generation of sportswriters, "I'm about ready to say they're the best team in the country."
Never mind that Jenkins, 79, attended TCU. A little local knowledge is a good thing when entering into a deep college football conversation with the author and journalist about Saturday's possibly historic events. Jenkins remembers Davey O'Brien and Sammy Baugh. He was there in the day when the school didn't have to beg for BCS scraps. It was part of the power elite.
Saturday is the day in Fort Worth when a small part of that history could return. It promises to be a signpost in BCS, Mountain West, school and purple history. The No. 4 Horned Frogs can all but clinch their first January bowl -- a BCS bowl -- in a half-century with a win over No. 16 Utah.
The same reason programs like Utah, Boise State and Cincinnati are downgraded for their lack of tradition and commitment to football is the same reason we need Dan Jenkins for this journey. The man routinely called the best sportswriter in America made his bones covering Texas-Oklahoma, USC-Notre Dame, Ohio State-Michigan.
Not only covering them, but defining them. Jenkins was at Sports Illustrated when the magazine was the weekly chronicle of record on every big sports event. Those days might have ended. Jenkins hasn't.
His books (such as Semi-Tough) have been made into movies. His golf writing has made immortals out of mere humans. On the subject of college football, he is an oracle imparting wisdom and an unwavering truth.
"College football is my passion," he said this week. "I grew up around college football. If you weren't a football fan as a little kid, they'd drown you in a bath tub."
So to hold his alma mater against him in this discussion is as shallow as a discussion with a Maxim model. Sometimes you know what is right. Sometimes you have to be told. Dan Jenkins is our instructor this week.
He happens to agree with a lot of us that TCU is equal to or better than the BCS top three -- Alabama, Florida and Texas. The evidence now is too compelling. Utah and Boise have taken their scalps on the national stage, showing us that sometimes those intimidating uniforms and all the tradition don't mean a damn thing.
"You might be able to guess what I think about [the BCS]. I hate it," Jenkins said. "I hate the fact that television sets schedules and game times and kickoffs. I hate that the BCS is running the traditional bowl games. I hate that Nike is dictating what everybody is supposed to wear ... at their own pleasure."
The same BCS that most likely will keep TCU from national championship consideration is also shining a light on the Frogs. It has caused us to look on the field where defensive end Jerry Hughes is going to be a first-round draft choice from the nation's No. 3 total defense. Jeremy Kerley is a top 10 punt returner with two taken back for touchdowns. Linebacker Tank Carder almost died in a car crash at 13. His only I-A scholarship offer was from Gary Patterson. Carder is on track to become all-Mountain West.
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| TCU alumnus Dan Jenkins believes in the Horned Frogs, and not just because he went there. (Getty Images) |
That was the score last year in Salt Lake City. TCU dominated for 58 minutes, but also missed two field goals, allowing Utah to put together one notable drive. It resulted in the game-winning touchdown with 47 seconds left.
"It was a heartbreaker," Patterson said. "The Utah game is definitely one everybody remembers."
So what's tougher, recruiting five-star athletes while backed by national championships, or squeezing blood out of a tomato? The latter is essentially what Patterson is doing. There is no small talk with TCU's coach. It's football all the time. Armed with a $2 million contract -- lavish by non-BCS standards -- Patterson has slogged through three conferences in 10 years as the program has searched for a big-time football identity.
"The problem with TCU is they've only got 8,000 enrollment," Jenkins said. "Even Cincinnati has an enrollment twice as large. In a town like Fort Worth you're always going to find more Longhorns and Aggies, times two, than you do TCU people. It's a long, hard, uphill battle. It takes a lot of winning to overcome."
In their heart of hearts, every Frog is yearning for a bowl matchup with Texas, preferably in the BCS title game. It would be a clash of everything college football is -- Texas' power, money, fans, talent -- vs. TCU.
"I would love to see that happen," former TCU AD Frank Windegger said. "I'd pray for it if I could. ... Beating Texas would not be a surprise to me."
The question is, could college football handle it? The more specific question is whether the SEC could handle it. If TCU plays for the national championship, it mostly like would go ahead of a one-loss SEC power.
Let's sum up the response from points South: Aaaaaahhhhhhh!
Still, any arguments about TCU's quality of competition are fading. For all of the conference's whining in the offseason, Utah did finish second in the final Associated Press poll last season. The Mountain West had three teams in the top 25. If TCU beats Utah on Saturday it will have beaten three currently ranked teams, including winning twice on the road in the ACC (Virginia, Clemson). The Froggies' participation in a BCS bowl would be the Mountain West's third in six years.
The difference is the BCS glass ceiling that will keep them from playing for the title -- that is, unless two of the three above them in the rankings lose down the stretch.
"If this were the 1930s their name would mean something to somebody," Jenkins said of TCU.
That's a claim Boise, Cincinnati and Utah can't make. There is tradition at TCU, even if it is only a whisp of a memory. Jenkins favors the old bowl system, the one that invited TCU to 10 January bowls in a 23-year period from 1936 through 1959. Jenkins anguishes about, "a 20-year gap where the administration didn't give a damn about competing and the board of trustees didn't care. They just kind of let the thing die. They're still coming back from that."
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Some of TCU's wounds were self-inflicted. In the 1980s, players confessed to taking money from boosters.
"It would take a good-sized bus to haul them off," one source told Sports Illustrated when asked how many boosters were involved.
Crippling NCAA penalties followed.
"That was like the death penalty," Windegger said. "It took us 10 years to get over that."
The other wound cut deep and was almost mortal. When the Big 12 was formed in 1995, TCU was not one of those taken along from the Southwest Conference, dooming it to second-class citizenship.
"That's a decision that never should have happened," Jenkins said. "If you're going to split up the SWC and build up the Big 12, I don't think you take Baylor, Texas Tech and Iowa State, or even Kansas State at the time, over TCU."
Saturday could be the day, then, when some small part of the glory returns. The Horned Frogs rose to No. 4 in the BCS standings this week. That ties for the highest ever by a non-BCS program. That might be where the dream stalls. Voters and computers could move the Frogs above the traditional powers, but that isn't likely.
Those uniforms, like the BCS, both hinder and help the Frogs. The garish purple tells the world that they don't belong with Crimson Tide, Gators and Longhorns. Nike, the outfitter that Jenkins railed against, is putting TCU in its Pro Combat Fit unis this week. In a convergence of fortune, those lighter uniforms could have the effect of dropping a match into a gas tank.
"We are so doggone fast," Windegger said. "It's their recruiting. They're not getting No. 1 players. They get good athletes who can run."
In that sense, TCU is no different than Miami in the '80s or LSU of today. We've already got a small sample that tells us the elite of the non-BCS schools can compete with the major powers. Boise was smaller but faster than Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl. Utah shocked Alabama, but not itself, using a veteran quarterback (Brian Johnson) and an active defense.
"You're not playing the tradition and all that, you're playing the guys," said Utah coach Kyle Whittingham, whose team has beaten four BCS schools from four different conferences in the last 14 months.
None of it happens unless TCU can seal the deal with an undefeated season. TCU hasn't played in a major bowl in 50 years. Jenkins and the purple army are on high alert. While the program's recent road has been smooth, it is littered with nails in tires. An 11-1 season in 2005 was marred by a loss to lowly SMU. After starting 10-0 in 2003, it lost to Southern Miss. There's always last year in Utah as a fresh reminder.
"We've already learned from Utah," Patterson said. "What it's done is helped us grow up."
Grown up enough to beat the big boys? Borrowing a title from one of our oracle's books, that would be Dead Solid Perfect .
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