No. 4 TCU stays unbeaten – but the script surely wasn’t the same

AUSTIN, Texas – No. 4 TCU continues to find new ways to stump the experts. The Horned Frogs, picked to finish seventh in the Big 12, won their first nine games with an explosive offense and the ability to come back from double-digit deficits in the second half. That’s not at all the playbook that TCU used Saturday night at No. 18 Texas.

It’s not so much that the Frogs, 7.5-point underdogs – c’mon, Vegas – “upset” the Longhorns. It’s that TCU won 17-10, holding Steve Sarkisian’s offense to one field goal and 199 total yards.

“Kind of a strange football game,” said TCU coach Sonny Dykes, whose Frogs clinched a berth in the Big 12 Championship Game and remained squarely in position for a College Football Playoff berth. “I don’t know that anybody really saw the football game going that way.”

We live in a world in which North Carolina redshirt freshman Drake Maye may win the Heisman, Iowa has emerged as the favorite to win the Big Ten West and Alabama won’t make the Playoff. So why not a game with an over/under of 66 points going into halftime with the score TCU 3, Texas 0.

The Frogs won the game in the second half, as they usually do. They may not have the talent that some other national championship contenders have, but TCU does a great job of not beating itself. Texas committed one turnover, TCU none (the Frogs have committed only six all season).

Early in the fourth quarter, when TCU quarterback Max Duggan threw a 31-yard touchdown pass to Quentin Johnston, there wasn’t a Texas defender within seven yards of Johnston. The cornerback handed Johnston off to the safety, who muffed the handoff.

TCU’s defense never made that kind of mistake. Texas had made 53 plays of at least 20 yards this season. TCU held the Longhorns to two. According to Frogs linebacker Johnny Hodges, “Ninety percent of the time, we did what we’re supposed to do.”

Johnston’s touchdown put TCU ahead 17-3, a deficit that felt like 71-3. With six minutes left in the game, Texas fans began streaming out of Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. Duggan then slipped and fumbled, which Jahdae Barron scooped up and took 48 yards for a touchdown to cut it to 17-10 with 4:25 to play. During the commercial break, Texas fans took the opportunity to stream back into the stadium.

But TCU never gave the ball back to Texas. The Frogs made three first downs and ran out the clock.

It’s not the first time in his coaching career that Sarkisian’s offense failed to score a touchdown (his Washington Huskies lost 41-3 at No. 3 LSU in 2012). But this one came as a bigger surprise.

“It’s as good as I’ve ever been around,” Dykes said of his defense’s work. “To hold this offense to three points? Are you kidding? This is an offense full of future NFL players.”

In the second half of the season, running back Bijan Robinson became the Longhorns’ offensive engine and a genuine Heisman candidate. For the season, he has rushed for 1,129 yards and 12 touchdowns. In Texas’ past three games, Robinson carried the ball 82 times for 484 yards and two touchdowns. As befits such a star on such a campus in the NIL age, Robinson drives a Lamborghini.

Saturday night, he carried the ball 12 times for 29 yards. He had a long gain of 9 yards. Came in in a Lambo, went out like a lamb. And Robinson played better than quarterback Quinn Ewers, who started the game 0-of-6. When someone finally caught one of Ewers’ passes early in the second quarter, he wore No. 1 for TCU, Tre’vius Hodges-Tomlinson. By the middle of the third quarter, it became clear the best quarterback to step on the Longhorns’ sideline Saturday night was Arch Manning. That’s where he stood watching pregame warmups.

Maybe Ewers just picked a bad night to have a bad night. Duggan didn’t start the game much better. Now, TCU has started slow all season, but this was a new kind of slow. Maybe it’s that Dykes moved the start of practice this week from 8:15 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. On the Frogs’ first 14 plays, they gained exactly zero net yards, mainly because Duggan got sacked three times.

“You go into this game thinking it’s going to be a high-scoring shootout, and all of a sudden it changes,” Dykes said. “ . . . We had to adjust our way of thinking as the game revealed itself to us.”

He meant playing field position, punting on fourth down, going for field goals, the kind of conventional thinking that Dykes has eschewed for most of the season.

“We started a lot behind the chains and were catching up,” Duggan said. “It took us a little bit. We had to do a better job of stringing together positive plays, not big plays, but just trying to get first downs.”

Before it ended, Kendre Miller had rushed for 138 yards on 21 carries, including a 75-yard touchdown run in the third quarter on which he went untouched by a burnt orange hand. That’s six consecutive 100-yard games for Miller, with at least one touchdown in each of them.

Dykes is the first coach in school history to begin his TCU career 10-0. The only other TCU coach to begin 9-0 was Francis Schmidt in 1929. His nickname was “Close the Gates of Mercy.” Daniel Dykes’ nickname is “Sonny.” Oh, well, Dykes lost the nickname battle. It’s the only thing he has lost this season.