Gary Patterson Has No Plans to Make a Change, but TCU Should
It’s past time for TCU’s all-time winningest coach to move on.
Gary Patterson is done taking risks. He’s done trying to change. He has been for a while.
On Saturday night, when he elected to punt from the Oklahoma 38-yard line with TCU trailing by 21 points nearing the end of the third quarter, it may have shocked viewers who don’t typically engage in the masochism that is watching TCU football. But it was no surprise to anyone who has watched his teams lately. It’s perfectly in line with the identity the TCU head coach has established for himself in recent years. To Patterson, risk is bad. It’s even worse than losing.
This is the same coach who routinely takes multiple timeouts to the locker room rather than attempt a two-minute drill at the end of a half; who believes “winning” time of possession and field position equates to winning in the final box score, despite years of evidence to the contrary; who would rather hire and promote his friends than bring in new voices that might challenge the way he does things.
Despite his unquestionable status as the best coach in TCU history and the work he’s done to elevate the Frogs to national prominence, the evidence has been mounting for years that Patterson’s prime is long past. Saturday’s loss to the Sooners didn’t show anything new — Oklahoma is 8–0 against the Frogs since Lincoln Riley started calling plays in Norman in 2015. Rather, it was simply confirmation of TCU’s current identity under their long-time coach.
The only question remaining is whether TCU is willing to change that identity, and whether they’ll have to push Patterson out to do so.
Underachieving Teams and Underwhelming Hires
At 3–3, it looks like TCU will be struggling just to finish around .500 for the fourth year in a row. They’re once again on pace to finish in the bottom half of the Big 12 standings.
They’ve been surpassed by Iowa State and Kansas State. Baylor surpassed TCU in its final year under Matt Rhule, and Dave Aranda is looking to do the same thing. And while Patterson can take pride in his 7–3 record against Texas since joining the Big 12, the Longhorns are still looking down at the Frogs in the final standings most years.
Much of that can be attributed to TCU’s refusal to adapt on offense. For the last three years, the Frogs have finished in the bottom half of the country in offensive SP+. In 2020, in the middle of that run of mediocrity, rather than seek out innovative play callers who could take advantage of TCU’s skill talent in new ways, Patterson chose to simply bring back Doug Meacham, the offensive coordinator he ran out of town years prior. Meacham took over play-calling from Sonny Cumbie, the guy Patterson tasked with calling the offense three years earlier after he didn’t like how Meacham had been running the show.
Only this time, rather than at least giving Meacham and Cumbie the freedom they had from 2014–2016 to run a full-fledged Air Raid, Patterson saddled them with a manager: his longtime friend Jerry Kill. Kill joined the staff as “special assistant to the head coach in charge of offense” in 2020. He brought a conservative, ball-control style that guaranteed TCU’s offensive coordinators would be kept in check, not taking any undue risks.
The result has been an offense that seems at war with itself.
The Frogs have the personnel to spread the field and get athletes the ball in space, yet they insist on throwing the ball almost exclusively outside the numbers, because those throws are perceived as safer, less likely to result in interceptions.
They have had a ton of talent at running back, headlined by Zach Evans, yet they don’t feature those backs nearly as much as one might expect from a team that says it wants to run the ball and consume clock.
This offseason offered an opportunity to reevaluate things when Cumbie left for Texas Tech, where he would be able to call plays again. Patterson could have looked for a new quarterbacks coach who had experience and could help Max Duggan take the next step in his development. Perhaps that coach could have brought some new ideas to the offensive scheme as well. Instead, he simply promoted graduate assistant Kenny Hill, his former quarterback who had never worked under another head coach or in a different offense. Status quo successfully maintained.
Patterson could have moved on from longtime TCU offensive assistant Jarrett Anderson, who has coached every position on offense but quarterback for the Frogs, and whose current stint with the offensive line has often seen Duggan pummeled by opposing pass rushers. People have been calling for Anderson’s job as far back as 2013, when he was co-offensive coordinator with Rusty Burns. But he’s safe, because he has been around for the entirety of Patterson’s tenure in Fort Worth. He’s not going anywhere.
The irony is that even with all those philosophical conflicts and questionable staffing decisions, the TCU offense has done enough to win games this season. They are actually ranked №15 in offensive SP+. They’re №5 in yards per carry and №14 in yards per pass attempt. That’s probably thanks to the talent on that side of the ball masking the deficiencies of the scheme and coaching, but still: the offense hasn’t been the problem.
It’s Patterson’s defense that has held the Frogs back in 2021.
Patterson made a name for himself by pioneering the 4–2–5 defense, variations of which have quietly become the base defenses for programs across the country. His philosophy is to put pressure on the passer and create negative plays in the run game with his front six, while his secondary uses pattern-matching coverages that adapt to counter whatever pass concepts the opponent calls. The result is supposed to be a defense that routinely puts opponents behind the chains and forces three-and-outs.
Except the Frogs aren’t doing those things anymore. They rank №77 nationally in defensive SP+. They rank №108 in sack rate. They are №122 in yards allowed per pass attempt and №124 in yards allowed per carry.
Their defensive linemen can’t hold their ground in the run game, and they can’t affect opposing quarterbacks. Their linebackers aren’t filling gaps well or wrapping up ball carriers. Their secondary is blowing coverage assignments, taking bad angles to the ball and missing tackles when they get to it.
Other defensive coaches might elect to simplify things for their players in the midst of those struggles. By pairing down his scheme, even temporarily, maybe his defenders could play faster and not get caught flat-footed so often. But by all accounts, that doesn’t seem to be something Patterson has any interest in doing.
TCU is dealing with some significant injuries on defense, to be fair. Defensive tackle Corey Bethley, defensive end Khari Coleman, cornerback Kee’yon Stewart, and safety Bud Clark have all missed significant snaps this season. Cornerback Noah Daniels has been in and out of the lineup for undisclosed reasons. Against Oklahoma, the Frogs were missing linebacker Wyatt Harris, and star cornerback Tre’vius Hodges-Tomlinson was out for the second half.
However, it strains credulity to believe those injuries account for the unit being this inept as a whole, especially when you consider the Frogs are producing these dreadful results with the highest-rated collection of talent the program has ever had.
TCU has signed the №3-ranked recruiting class in the Big 12 in five of the past six years. According to the 247Sports composite, TCU has landed 15 of its top 20 recruits of the recruiting ranking era since 2016. The Frogs consistently bring in more talent than any team in the Big 12 besides Texas and Oklahoma.
And yet Patterson’s squad has only finished among the top three teams in the conference on the field once in that same time frame. Every year Patterson offers the same placating platitudes: They’re banged up. They’re young. They’ve got to grow up. As if every other team in the league that’s lapping TCU right now hasn’t also had to deal with injuries and inexperience, and hasn’t had to do so with less talent and depth — at least on paper — than the Frogs.
Embarrassments on and off the Field
That’s to say nothing of the off-field blunders Patterson has committed over the last few years. How about a quick rundown?
In March 2018, KaVontae Turpin was arrested in New Mexico and charged with misdemeanor battery involving a household member after allegedly assaulting his girlfriend. He also faced a misdemeanor property damage charge. TCU was aware that Turpin had been arrested, but Patterson’s program didn’t do the necessary due diligence to discover the extent of the allegations. According to Patterson, his staff only knew about the property damage charge, so TCU allowed a man credibly accused of violence against a partner to remain with the program.
Then Turpin was arrested a second time in October 2018, this time in Fort Worth, on charges of assault causing bodily injury to a family member after an incident with the same woman. The woman told police that Turpin had “dragged” her across a parking lot and “slammed” her to the ground. Only after that second set of allegations was Turpin dismissed from the team.
In 2020, then-TCU linebacker Dylan Jordan said Gary Patterson used a racial slur in front of him. A group of TCU players had to meet with Patterson and explain why his use of the word was inappropriate.
Patterson eventually issued an apology via Twitter, and Jordan later transferred to Butler Community College in El Dorado, Kansas.
This season, following TCU’s second-straight loss to SMU in the Battle for the Iron Skillet, Patterson publicly claimed someone with the SMU program hit Kill with a football helmet. He refused to back off that verifiably false account of events, even when all publicly available video evidence showed that it was a group of TCU players who accidentally knocked Kill to the ground.
His refusal to recant his comments served to undercut his own athletic director.
TCU’s Jeremiah Donati purportedly assured SMU AD Rick Hart that Patterson would walk back his comments. Instead, Patterson doubled down, in defiance of the man who is ostensibly supposed to be his boss.
We haven’t even started on how Patterson views and treats his own players.
In 2018, former TCU receiver Kolby Listenbee sued Patterson and TCU for alleged verbal abuse and mishandling of a pelvic injury during Listenbee’s senior season in 2015. The suit was eventually settled in 2019 for an undisclosed amount.
Also in 2018, Patterson bemoaned the freedom afforded players by the newly created transfer portal.
“What we’re teaching our kids to do is quit,” Patterson said of the NCAA’s changing transfer rules at the time. Yet that hasn’t kept him from recruiting players from the portal to patch holes in his own roster.
He’s been critical of the fact that players are now able to make money from their name, image and likeness (NIL). He said earlier this year that other programs would be trying to poach a huge chunk of his roster with more lucrative NIL deals than they could get in Fort Worth unless TCU boosters started dropping the bag.
Amidst those same comments, when discussing the sums of money other schools might be able to offer his players, he had this gem: “Five thousand dollars to someone who has dirt on their floors is a lot of money.”
Patterson could do something to address those NIL concerns. He could make an effort to actually market his athletes and give them the opportunity to show their personality to fans and media. Instead, he puts most of them in a vault, shielding even his best players from reporters, which has helped keep most of them from becoming marketable enough to even attempt to secure NIL deals. It also doesn’t help that it’s really hard to market yourself when you play for a mediocre team every year.
In 2021, Patterson should recognize that bold-faced lies to the media, acting like your program houses state secrets, and treating your players with condescension and even outright contempt is a bad idea. However, if anything, those characteristics of Patterson’s have gotten worse over the past few years, not better.
Let’s be completely honest: if Patterson coached at a program where he faced greater scrutiny, and had produced the same results on the field over the last three and a half seasons, and made the same — let’s generously call them “unforced errors” — off the field, he would no longer be employed.
It Wasn’t Always Like This
Patterson set the standard for success at TCU. He’s the winningest coach in program history. The school is so indebted to Patterson that it put a bronze statue of him outside the stadium while he was still coaching.
It’s thanks to him that the Frogs are in the Big 12. They’ve claimed six conference titles, as well as victories in the Rose Bowl and the Peach Bowl since he took over as head coach. Six of his players have been taken in the first round of the NFL draft since 2010, matching the total number of first-round picks the Frogs had from 1958–2009. His success is why the athletic facilities are light years ahead of what they once were. Fans and media nationwide recognize and respect TCU football because of him.
Ironically, Patterson helped TCU accomplish all of that by pushing the Frogs to do things they had never done before. He made TCU change.
He innovated a defensive scheme that became a blueprint for programs across college football, and he continually adapted that scheme to combat the advancements of college offenses.
He reinvented how TCU recruited, turning the Frogs into a case study for talent evaluation and development. To overcome the talent gap between TCU and other programs, Patterson took overlooked recruits — Jerry Hughes, Paul Dawson, Ty Summers, and more — had them switch to new positions where he believed they had a higher ceiling, and turned them into all-conference and sometimes All-American players.
His most successful embrace of change came after two years of middling results in the Big 12, when he brought in Meacham and Cumbie to overhaul the offense in 2014. He gave them free reign to recruit, practice, and call plays how they wanted, and they rewarded him with two years of the best offense in school history, as they put players like Trevone Boykin and Josh Doctson in position to capitalize on their previously untapped potential.
TCU desperately needs to adapt again — on offense, on defense, in recruiting, with NIL— to avoid being left behind by its peers in the Big 12. Patterson could choose to help the program take the next step in those areas. Or he could do what Bob Stoops did at Oklahoma and step aside gracefully, offering his public blessing to a new coach who was better equipped to lead the program into the future.
But Patterson’s final act at TCU instead looks increasingly like the end of Mack Brown’s time at Texas. He has abandoned the willingness he once had to try new things. He’s stubbornly sticking to his ways and his ultra-conservative sensibilities. He’s engaging in blatant nepotism and cronyism. He’s regurgitating the same tired talking points every season to explain away his program’s failures rather than honestly evaluating how his choices might be torpedoing the program’s future.
In that regard, Saturday night wasn’t a breaking point. It was just more of the same.
“You have to manage a season,” Patterson said later of that controversial punt in TCU’s eventual 52–31 loss to the Sooners. “You’re not just managing a ball game, you’re managing a season. Which side of the ball is beat up? You better manage the season, because the key is to get to six (wins) and then win more.”
Not playing to win. Instead, managing a season. It’s a far cry from Patterson’s old mantra of trying to “go take ball games” on the road. Rather than playing like an underdog with nothing to lose, now he wants to play like a favorite, even when he hasn’t earned it.
Patterson has made it clear that he has no plans to change on his own. So TCU needs to either force him to change, or make the change for him.
