TCU Year in Review: Trials and Tribulations of the Horned Frogs in 07'

While it appears that the 2007 version of the Horned Frogs are headed to post-season play for the 9th time in ten seasons after posting a 7-5 overall record, it will be difficult not to look back on the 2007 campaign and wonder: “what if?” 

With the dramatic victory of Boise State against Oklahoma last season in the Fiesta Bowl fresh in the minds of college football fans everywhere, the Horned Frogs took the field with their eyes on one prize and one prize alone: quite simply, it was time to crash the BCS party.

For the first six quarters of the season, it looked to be the year of the Horned Frog.  The Frogs shut out Big 12 doormat Baylor, and then went to Austin and held the ‘Horns scoreless for the first thirty minutes of the game.  Unfortunately, TCU’s fortunes would change during halftime, as Texas outscored TCU 34-3 in the second half. 

BCS hopes? Gone.

After that game, the Frogs seemed to never regain their swagger.  TCU followed up their collapse in Austin with Coach Patterson’s first ever loss to a service academy, falling to Air Force in overtime.

Conference championship hopes?  Pretty much gone.

After the Air Force loss, the Frogs seemed to fall into a rut.  They won games they were expected to win (the one exception being a loss to Wyoming...I still don’t know how to explain that one) and they lost the games they were expected to lose (one being to MWC champ BYU, and the other to Utah). The Frogs do deserve some love however, for finishing the regular season with convincing wins over both UNLV and San Diego State.

Now that the regular season is over, the Frogs look towards a Bowl game of some sort.  Early projections had the Frogs playing at their own house in the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl—however the selection committee has invited the Air Force Academy (fitting, I know) to be the MWC representative. 

My personal projection has TCU making an encore performance in the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl, playing the Naval Academy on December 20.  If that turns out to be the case, it will present itself as a very interesting and entertaining football game for the folks in San Diego.

While I intend to dig more into this topic in a later piece, it seems to me that going into this off-season, Coach Patterson and his staff have got to get the team refocused on what should always be the number one goal: winning the conference.  This will be the second straight year that the Frogs have finished in the middle of the pack, and I attribute some of that to the mindset of the players and coaches.

To use the old saying: they’ve got their head in the clouds without keeping their feet on the ground.

More on that later, as well as thoughts on TCU’s Bowl game (if they play in one).