Despite loss, TCU is in: ‘I was worried. I’m not going to lie.’

FORT WORTH, Texas – The suspense in the Legends Suite of Amon G. Carter Stadium on Sunday morning punched above its weight. There really shouldn’t have been any suspense. No. 3 TCU had lost Saturday, the Horned Frogs’ first loss of the season, to Kansas State, 31-28 in overtime. Only four teams had zero or one loss. Only four teams make the College Football Playoff.

But until it’s official, it’s not official.

“I was worried. I’m not going to lie,” coach Sonny Dykes said.

“I was actually pretty nervous,” quarterback Max Duggan said. “My heart was kind of beating.”

The athletic department arranged about 160 chairs to watch the playoff reveal on ESPN. Between the team, the coaching staff, families, invited donors (stadium suite holders and members of the Investors Society, the $50,000-plus set) and, well, any fan who walked through the door, the crowd may have been closer to 260 than 160.

The players sat at the front of the room, cameras arrayed before them. As the chatter about No. 1 Georgia and No. 2 Michigan went on – and on and on – the low hum of noise in the room stilled. Dykes paced back and forth, in front of the team but behind the buffet carts. A couple of times, he moved closer to the players and craned his neck to see the overhead TV screens.

When the TCU logo came onto the screen to fill the No. 3 slot in the bracket, the sound in the Legends Suite erupted and stayed loud for minutes. The players leaped from their chairs and embraced one another. Dykes stood in front of them, clapping and apart, for several seconds before he waded into his celebrating team.

Fifty-three weeks earlier, Dykes stood in this room for the news conference announcing his hire. No one at that time had the slightest case of nerves concerning TCU’s playoff chances. The Horned Frogs had gone 5-7. Coach Gary Patterson, who won 181 games, had reached his sell-by date.

Dykes’ brand of easygoing pragmatism proved to be just the adhesive to bring this team together.

“It’s been quite a journey, from where we were this time last year to where we are today,” Dykes said Sunday. “You’ve got to give our players and everybody associated with our program a ton of credit for just believing, and believing in the journey and doing things the right way and understanding that you get rewarded by doing things the right way and preparing, emptying the tank every Saturday and refilling it as soon as that job is over.

“Our guys have done an unbelievable job of doing that. It’s a great lesson for them for the rest of their lives, and a great lesson to us for the rest of our lives, about showing up every day and going to work. If you’ve got a group of talented people, like we do, if they decide to come together and make sacrifices for each other, something special can happen.”

TCU left guard Steve Avila, asked whether the playoff announcement brought relief or excitement, said, “A little bit of both. I hate that we had to be in a situation where we were on the edge of our seats when it comes to this. But things happen. We’re going to learn from it.”

Speaking of which, time for a history lesson.

In 1938, TCU became the first school in Texas to finish atop the Associated Press college football poll and the first Texas school to have a Heisman winner (Davey O’Brien). For the past few decades, those facts seemed like relics of an earlier era. Instead, past has become prologue. On Sunday, TCU became the first school in Texas to make the 9-year-old College Football Playoff.