TCU caught in the middle of college football’s ‘everything must go!’ madness

Year 1 of the most important two years of TCU’s football program can be called a bust.

A bust because the team will not meet the expectations set by athletic director Mike Buddie. There will be no appearance in the Big 12 title game, or the playoff.

TCU’s 44-13 defeat Saturday night at No. 12 BYU was a nail gun to the needs of the program, and university. Barring a season-ending three-game winning streak, the finale being the Stale Milk Bowl, TCU will not equal its win total from 2024. It will also not finish in the Top 25 for the third straight year, during which it has been a ranked program for two weeks.

Year 4 of the Sonny Dykes era at TCU is supposed to be better than this.

The momentum created by TCU’s run to the national title game in 2022 has evaporated, and is overwhelmed by a current madness of firing coaches while worshiping the SEC, Big Ten and Notre Dame.

The development has put TCU in a difficult spot with coach Sonny Dykes. After starting the season with a 4-1 record, the weaknesses of the team have been fleshed out in defeats to Kansas State, Iowa State and BYU.

TCU is a decent team that has no margin for error, or mistakes. And the team doesn’t belong on the same field as BYU or Texas Tech, the top programs in the Big 12.

The reality for Dykes is that the program has not developed the type of talent that carried this team to the national title game; there has not been a new set of quality offensive linemen to the level of Steve Avila, Brandon Coleman and Andrew Coker.

There have been no new players to create the type of production on the defensive side, such as linebacker Dee Winters, defensive end Dylan Horton, or cornerbacks Tre Hodges-Tomlinson and Josh Newton.

(The easy shot here is that those players were recruited by Gary Patterson. Other than Newton, this is true. Also true, that group of talent was not winning games.)

Most damning of all for Dykes and offensive coordinator Kendal Briles is their high-priced quarterback, Josh Hoover, has regressed in a season where in the first month he deserved to be in the discussion for the Heisman Trophy.

Too much is asked of Hoover, who needs help that he hasn’t received.

The state of the team has left angry fans to parcel together a slate of unflattering statistics that make Dykes look like a terrible coach who should be fired today. Stats that begin with the sentence, “Starting with the 65-7 loss to Georgia in the 2022 national title game … TCU is 0-7 against coaches who own Cockapoos, and are out-scored by an average margin of 24.5 points in games that start at 9:05 p.m. Hawaiian time.”

This is not a good place to be for a head coach, and worse for his school. A place where fans and alums want their team to lose, just accelerate the firing process. Once the momentum starts in this direction, it’s hard to convince the masses to be patient.

They have been able to do it at Oklahoma. And USC.

They couldn’t at Penn State. Or LSU. Auburn. Florida. The list grows by the week of coaches who are fired, despite their achievements, or the size of their buyouts.

Dykes was never the most popular hire to replace Patterson. There are circles and pockets of TCU supporters that regard any positive achievement by Dykes as dumb luck, while every defeat is the true indicator of his coaching acumen.

All of this is compounded exponentially by a culture that remembers nothing, whose impatience is satiated by a phone that says life is better elsewhere. If you’re not winning, and the game isn’t “big,” they’re not coming.

This puts TCU in a hard spot. Because it’s not in TheBIGSEC10, most schools in the ACC and Big 12 operate with the fear that those conferences will soon grab a few more schools, which will in effect turn the remainders of the lesser two leagues into glorified Group of Five universities.

This may not be an actual reality, but the prospect of it strikes the fear of 5,000 Greek Gods into schools. Without a winning football team that’s in the conversation of the playoff, their chance at national relevance, and leverage, is nearly disabled.

It’s why winning coaches are easily fired, and millions of dollars in buyout cash falls from the sky in states that are broke.

TCU is not apt to join the national trend of firing its coach this season, but more likely to “encourage” Dykes to make staff changes in hopes of improvement, because Year 1 of the most important time in the history of its football program has gone bust.

This story was originally published November 16, 2025 at 3:21 PM.