Crystal Wise
Before the season, TCU’s 2022 football team was thought to be as worthy of a vote in a national preseason poll as, say, Charlie Sheen a spot in the seminary.
The Horned Frogs’ peers in the Big 12 Conference, meanwhile, forecast a team that would be an also-ran. Big 12 coaches picked TCU down the ballot, seventh, in fact, placing Baylor, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Kansas State, and Iowa State all ahead of the hometown fellas.
Conventional wisdom dictated the Frogs were a program in transition, with a new coach, new staff, new philosophy, new culture, and new players.
No one saw the storm about to hit shore.
The Frogs kept proving everybody wrong, week after week, figuring out how to win close games. In total, TCU won six games by a single score. We all knew something special was brewing after the Baylor miracle on the Brazos River. That sort of thing doesn’t merely happen.
Still, the smartest people on Twitter kept waiting for the Frogs to slip, despite having great leadership, particularly at quarterback, an offensive line that mixed it up in the trenches, and a tough and physical defense that collected turnovers.
In the end TCU became the envy of the state, going where no football team in Texas has gone before: the College Football Playoffs.
There was something about this team that everyone missed. That particular quality that drives the analytics nerds crazy because there is no value you can put on it. You can’t quantify it or gauge it. It’s the it factor. TCU had it.
There’s an anecdote that perfectly characterizes this team.
A writer, a gentleman by the name of Elbert Hubbard, spent a long night thinking about the coming Spanish-American War and “all this Cuban business” in 1899. It manifested in his penning an essay titled “A Message to Garcia.”
It tells a fictional story of First Lieutenant Andrew S. Rowan.
President William McKinley was desperately trying to send a message to the leader of the Cuban insurgency, a man named Garcia, who was somewhere in the mountain fastness of Cuba, “no one knew where.”
“There’s a fellow by the name of Rowan,” the President was told, he “will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.” The man, Rowan, was sent for and given the letter. Never asking the President where this Garcia was, Rowan sealed the letter in an oil-skin pouch, strapped it over his heart, and in four days landed at night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat. He disappeared into the jungle and “in three weeks came out on the other side of the island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and having delivered his letter to Garcia.”
The author concluded: “There is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze, and the statue placed in every college in the land. It is not book learning young men need, nor instruction about this or that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies; do the thing — ‘carry a message to Garcia!’”
This entire TCU football season, with its band of gritty performers, was a daring escapade of can-doism that should never be forgotten, cast in bronze even, if necessary.
The season’s success validated the university’s selection of Sonny Dykes as head coach after the difficult decision to part ways with Gary Patterson in 2021, a move that left many fans and alumni cranky. You don’t just give the coach who sits at the right hand the boot, or so the thinking goes whenever this kind of thing happens.
But there is a time and a place for everything, we are told.
Hiring Dykes as steward to the legacy of Meyer and Patterson instinctively just felt right. A West Texas guy taking over the football program in the city Where the West Begins.
That was the constellations aligning. And they aligned more than once in a winding trail of circumstances in the story to be told.
Dykes was selected for 10 National Coach of the Year awards this season, including The Associated Press, the Eddie Robinson Award, Paul "Bear" Bryant Award, and Stallings Award.
The Frogs finished No. 2 in the final Associated Press poll and the second team to be in the CFP after starting the season unranked. TCU also became just the third team since 1998 to play for a national title while beginning the season unranked. TCU's six wins over ranked opponents tied for most in the nation.
Dykes is Fort Worth Inc.’s 2023 Person of the Year, an honor bestowed on an individual who has demonstrated a significant contribution to making Greater Fort Worth a better place to live and work with emphasis placed on their contributions over the past year. One must also be a member of the magazine’s The 400, the list of Fort Worth’s most influential people, who were honored during a reception at the Fort Worth Club on May 18.
Crystal Wise
TCU’s run to the CFP National Championship Game — including a victory, victory, right, right, right over Michigan in the national semifinals — brought the university and city worldwide, in some cases even unprecedented, attention.
Dykes was only the third head coach in the CFP era to guide his team to the playoff in his first season. The unanimous Big 12 Coach of the Year, Dykes became the first head football coach in TCU and Big 12 history to start 12-0 in his first season and was only the fourth head coach nationally since 1996 to accomplish the feat.
He did it so quickly through building relationships of trust, says Brian Estridge, TCU’s play-by-play voice and founder of Frogs Today.
“The first thing he did was build trust among the players, the staff members who were already here … the training staff and equipment staff,” says Estridge. “The first thing he recognized was in order for us to be on the same page, they had to trust each other. He did that by being fully transparent. There were no secrets or hidden agendas, or backroom deals. He doesn’t talk ill of people behind closed doors. He also took care of the players. He made nutrition a priority, and he made rest a priority. It wasn’t always grinding, grinding, grinding.
“The second thing he did was laid it all out. This is what we do, and why we do it. They had to realize there was a method to the madness. When they saw the method to the madness and knew that they could trust him … .”
The most special season in TCU history ensued.
The season changed a program, and it changed lives, including the eight Horned Frogs who were taken in this year’s NFL Draft, the third-most of any school, behind Alabama and, ahem, Georgia. Guys going to the NFL included Quentin Johnston, Steve Avila, Kendre Miller, Dylan Horton, Derius Davis, Tre’Vius Hodges-Tomlinson, Dee Winters, and Max Duggan.
Five more will get chances to play as rookie free agents, including Alan Ali, Taye Barber, Emari Demercado, Gunnar Henderson, and Lwal Uguak.
“Somebody told me that after the Michigan game, I don't remember who it was. I want to say it was somebody from ESPN,” Dykes says. “We were doing a postgame interview, and they're like, ‘You know, you realize now your life is going to be a lot different.’ I remember at the time thinking, I don't think that's the case, but it has been. You just get recognized a little bit more.”
He can’t go much anywhere in town without being recognized.
It all represents a remarkable turnabout and ascent in college football for Dykes, who for a minute actually considered a career change.
That was before Fort Worth intervened. Dykes in Fort Worth, by all appearances, was simply meant to be.
Dykes had just been fired at California, an unfortunate turn of events. The fit was never a good one when he left Louisiana Tech for Berkeley, ground zero for the counterculture movement of the 1960s — Bezerkely, it has been called — a seemingly strange place for a guy whose roots were planted next to an oil rig and football field in West Texas.
The school is more, like, into Nobel Laureates than football. It’s a difficult place to win. Plus, the president who hired him had retired, and the athletic director was fired within a year of Dykes’ arrival.
Dykes went to Cal to rebuild. The Bears went 3-9 the year before, 2012, and unsurprisingly Dykes went 1-11 in his first year there. His second saw marked improvement, 5-7, and year three represented a breakthrough, an 8-5 record, with Jared Goff, the future No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft, under center, and a spot in the Fort Worth’s Armed Forces Bowl. It was after that year that things really began to sour. Dykes reportedly interviewed for vacant positions at Missouri, Virginia, and South Carolina.
He received a contract extension from Cal, but the next year Dykes interviewed at — hold your nose — Baylor, which hired Matt Rhule instead. However, Cal officials were miffed as Dykes continued to hatch an escape back to Texas.
A 5-7 year in 2016 was reason enough for Cal, looking for a reason, to file for divorce.
“Sonny undoubtedly built up our program — both on the field and in the classroom,” athletic director Mike Williams wrote at the time. “We credit Sonny for Cal football’s turnaround throughout the 2013-2016 seasons.”
He closed one portion of a letter to alumni that “we look for a head coach who wants to be at Cal.”
Of his tenure at Cal, Dykes says he “loved it. It was a great place. The Bay Area was a really cool place. I got to do and see some amazing things that I would have never had a chance to see or experience. I was proud really of the progress we made in the program.”
The Lord and college athletics work in mysterious ways.
So, Dykes and his family loaded up their things and hightailed it back to Texas, where they belong.
“What happened there, I think, it was a great lesson for me,” Dykes says. “I went there for a couple of reasons. No. 1, there was tremendous stability within the university and the football program. They had had a president that had been there for over a decade and an athletic director had been there over a decade.
“Well, I take the job and the the president retires three months after I take the job and the AD gets fired. It was challenging. [Those two] knew the challenges within Cal football, they knew it was gonna kind of take a while to rebuild.”
That was the allure of the job, Dykes says, the president and AD knew the program required a total tear down and rebuild and then, suddenly, “they weren’t there.” Interim presidents and athletic directors followed.
“It just showed me how important leadership is … just top down alignment in leadership. And it was just such, it was, it was rocky because of there just wasn't that. It worked out where I got to come home. We were really thankful it worked out the way it did. Certainly.”
Sonny Dykes’ given name is Daniel Dykes, the youngest of three siblings born to Sharon and Spike Dykes. He was born in Big Spring. Daniel was the name of one of Spike’s best friends. Another close friend was Sonny Everett.
“My dad swears that Sonny was my middle name,” Dykes explains. “But my mom didn't put [Sonny] on the birth certificate because she didn't want to call me Sonny. But my dad ended up calling me Sonny my whole life.”
Spike died in 2017 at age 79. Sharon passed away in 2010. In Dykes’ office is a framed letter of condolence President George H.W. Bush sent to Spike on the event of Sharon’s passing. Spike and Bush had been friends in Midland.
His father is one of the most revered coaches — and characters — in Texas football history, retiring from the game in 1999 after 13 full seasons as head coach at Texas Tech.
Spike gained renown for the wisdom and witticisms he dispensed regarding football and football outcomes.
“They whipped us like a tied-up goat.”
“When you have five turnovers, miss two field goals and get another one blocked, my gosh, that’s enough to choke a mule.”
“A lot of people want to be around when you’re having a parade, but not many want to serve as pallbearer.”
“They say you lose 10% of your fan base every year. And I’ve been here 11 years, so, you do the math.”
“Last time Texas Tech was in the Cotton Bowl, Moby Dick was a minnow.”
The way the story goes, it was one of Spike’s assistants at Big Spring who first held baby Sonny. The Steers were at practice when Sharon went into labor, so, Spike sent a trusted assistant, Gary Griffin, to go check on her.
When Sonny arrived, he was passed to Griffin, who had gone above and beyond his charge.
Spike was a high school football coach initially after graduating from Stephen F. Austin, beginning in Eastland in 1959.
Between his own career and his father’s, Dykes counts at least 21 moves.
Big Spring, Alice, Austin (where his father was an assistant Darrell Royal’s staff); Albuquerque, New Mexico; Starkville, Mississippi; Midland; and Lubbock.
Sonny Dykes’ career has taken him to Monahans and then to Richardson; Corsicana; Lexington, Kentucky; Monroe, Louisiana; back to Lexington; Lubbock; Tucson, Arizona; Ruston, Louisiana; Berkeley; Fort Worth; Dallas; and Fort Worth.
Moving is a reality in the profession, but after Cal and the move back, Dykes and his family “desperately” wanted to stay in Texas. Long ago, when he was thinking about life after college — he was a baseball player at Texas Tech — Dykes had considered leaving the family business of coaching. His brother Rick had also made livelihood out of it.
“I started thinking about my life without football and without being a part of a team and just that experience of, you know, being a part of something. The idea of being on a team has always appealed to me, the shared sacrifice for a greater good. That’s always moved the needle for me. So, I start thinking, ‘OK, if I go into business, what's that gonna be like? I'm not gonna have that.’”
When he arrived at TCU in 2017 as an offensive consultant under Patterson, he again thought, if only briefly, about another professional life. By this time, of course, he had established himself as a college football coach, but he had uprooted his family to move all over the country in pursuit of a coaching career, first to Arizona to become offensive coordinator under Mike Stoops, and then to Ruston, Louisiana, as the head coach at Louisiana Tech, and then off to Berkeley.
Had he not landed the job at SMU, where would the Dykes’ family, which so wanted to stay in Texas, have landed?
“I think I was trying to cover my bases more than anything,” Dykes says of thoughts of a different career. “I wanted to coach, and I feel like in a weird sort of way, it's probably my calling. So, don't know that I would have done [something different as a career], but it kind of got to that point where I thought I better start to look around a little bit.”
Dykes’ wife Kate also comes from a coaching family. There are three Joe Goldings, and all of them were or are coaches. Her grandfather, like Spike, made a legend of himself at Wichita Falls High School. Joe Golding Sr.’s Coyotes teams reached the state title game six times in his 15 years, winning four, including in 1961 when Wichita Falls beat Paschal in the state semifinals at Farrington Field. Kate’s father, Joe Golding Jr., coached girls basketball at Wichita Falls for almost 20 years before retiring. And Joe Golding III, her brother, is the head basketball coach at UTEP.
Together, Dykes and his wife, married 17 years, have three children, Ally, Charlie, and Daniel, a tribute to his mother, Sonny says, who wanted a Daniel all those years ago.
TCU holds some practices in the morning so that Dykes can pick up the kids from school and have dinner with them. A typical day during the season begins at 4:30 in the morning and can finish up somewhere around 10 p.m.
Crystal Wise
When Dykes was growing up, dinner could be at 10:30 at night because that’s when Spike’s workday wrapped up, too. This Dykes didn’t want that for his family, at least one person says.
His mother, Sharon, was a big influence on him growing up, with Spike at his office all the time. Sharon impressed on him a love of the arts and reading. Dykes has a degree in history from Texas Tech.
“She loved to read; she loved music,” Dykes says of his mother. “All that stuff had a huge effect on me. Because of her, I've always been a reader, and I've always been somebody who really enjoyed music and the arts and have an interest in those kinds of things. We used to go to garage sales all the time when I was a kid and buy used books. I might have been in fourth grade, and we bought, you know, Jaws and The Godfather and Roots and all these things, and started reading them, you know, probably before I should have.”
His most recent book was a Paul Newman biography, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: a Memoir, but he has also consumed all of Malcolm Gladwell’s bibliography.
Reading, he says, has provided an essential ingredient to being an executive: perspective. We all have a point of view simply based on our upbringing and background and to what we’ve been exposed. Another has a completely different point of view for the same reason. Now, combine 85 different perspectives. Some come from stable, two-parent homes in a higher socioeconomic condition. Others come from dysfunction. Still, others weren’t raised by their parents at all.
“That's what makes this thing so unique,” Dykes says. “I think it's one of the biggest challenges that we have is trying to get everybody in that room to walk in somebody else's shoes, to see things from their perspective and respect their differences and, really, celebrate their differences.
“We work really hard to have that kind of a culture within our program. And I think our players enjoy that. I think they like that we respect that and honor that and appreciate it.”
Dykes told me once in the past that the best thing he learned from Spike was how to treat people. The best player on the team, the worst player on the team; the biggest donor to the guy cleaning the office. They were all treated with the same dignity and respect.
“Everybody was the same to him,” Dykes says. “That’s certainly something I’ve tried to emulate in my life. An understanding that everybody is important, and everybody matters. I thought he understood that as well as anybody and demonstrated that as well as anybody could.”
There’s a relatively unknown story about Spike that could have set off a butterfly effect at TCU.
The year was 1994 and then-TCU coach Pat Sullivan was flirting with LSU, his alma mater, about becoming its next coach. All that was holding up Sullivan’s move was a buyout clause in his contract with TCU. It was never resolved, and Sullivan stayed.
While the drama played out over 10 days in December, TCU athletic director Frank Windegger was drawing up contingency plans.
One of those was Spike, then at Texas Tech, who wasn’t seeing eye to eye with Texas Tech athletic director Bob Bockrath. It was a story I’d heard at the time from former Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter Johnny Paul, who didn’t have anything firm other than a gut feeling after talking to Windegger about it. Windegger would neither confirm nor deny that he had talked to Spike about the job, if Sullivan bolted to Louisiana.
Paul never wrote a word about it because he had nothing to go on except a hunch. Windegger’s reaction to the question of whether he had talked to Spike had Paul convinced, however.
As it turned out, Johnny Paul was right. (Johnny loves to hear people say that, by the way.)
“I do know for a fact that TCU reached out to Spike,” says Rick Dykes, Sonny’s older brother who coached under his father from 1990 – 99. “I was actually in my father’s office when those calls came through. A lot of people felt Pat was going to be the coach at LSU. I’m not sure what [Spike] would have done [had he received an offer]. But that is true.
“Spike always thought TCU was one of the better jobs in the state of Texas. Every year we prepared to play TCU, we thought TCU had as much potential as any job in the state. He felt that way up to the very end. I think Fort Worth and TCU are special places. The potential here is unlimited.”
If Spike had come to TCU, Dennis Franchione might not have been hired, or — gasp — Gary Patterson.
Said Sonny: “I didn't even know that. I probably wouldn't be here now. That would preclude me from being here. Probably. You know, our business is strange, and you just really never know. But it's funny, my dad always talked about how much potential he thought TCU had.”
While Rick Dykes coached with Spike, Sonny joining his staff at Texas Tech never was an option. Spike wanted Sonny to go his own way, create his own path. Dykes wanted that, too.
“I think we both knew it was probably not gonna be a good move for us,” Dykes says simply from a football standpoint. Spike was a defensive-oriented coach with an old-school mentality. Old-school is cliché, but no one was going to mistake Spike for cutting edge.
“I think we both value the same things that we both believe what you have to do to win football games,” Dykes says. “We both believe in relationships with players, how important that is. We both believe that this profession is certainly about more than just winning and losing because I really do believe you get to have an impact on a lot of people's lives, and he appreciated that part of coaching. I do, too.”
Dykes instead left the state and found a situation as cutting edge as you could find at the time.
Coming home is a theme in Dykes’ career, and he’s done it at key moments.
His route back to Lubbock started in Kentucky with two guys who were doing things differently. Dykes moved to Kentucky to work as a graduate assistant under Hal Mumme and his offensive coordinator Mike Leach, both quirky guys with revolutionary ideas about how to move the football with a frenetic, hyperactive, pass-happy philosophy with receivers spread along the line as far as the eye could see.
It was called the Air Raid offense, and it or a derivative of it eventually spread across the landscape like a pathogen from Wuhon.
Dykes says his chief mentors in leadership were Spike and Leach, the only guy to win more games at Texas Tech than Spike Dykes.
“I have a vision for what I want things to look like, but I want input from everybody. I want everybody to feel like they have a voice in our program. My dad was that way as well. I think he had an idea of what he wanted the end result to look like, but he realized there were a million different ways to get there. I kind of feel the same way.
“I learned a lot from Mike Leach, just in terms of thinking outside the box and being creative and not being afraid to try something different, and not paying attention to convention.”
Always trying to build a better mouse trap, as he says. In college football, Dykes says, you have to kind of reinvent yourself every year and be willing to change and be flexible.
“Things change so much in our profession, in our industry. You can't afford to just keep up; you have to be innovative. You gotta be ahead of the curve. I always felt like Mike and many of those guys I worked for were that way. They had a principle that they believed in, some core beliefs, but they were willing to talk and scheme ways to get there differently than other people.”
Dykes returned to Lubbock as a member of Leach’s staff when “the pirate” got the Tech job
When Leach died on the eve of TCU’s victory over Michigan in the Fiesta Bowl, Dykes reflected: “A big part of my feelings pregame will be about Mike, the impact he had on my life. I wouldn’t be here without him.”
As an homage to Leach, the Frogs wore a pirate flag sticker on their helmets.
Perhaps no one in college football has been as innovative in the new era of the transfer portal as Dykes, who always seemed able to fill holes at SMU through the portal. At TCU last year, he and his staff added 14 key pieces.
They also hung onto key pieces, including Quentin Johnston, now a member of the Los Angeles Chargers after April’s NFL Draft. A trip to the Johnstons’ home in Temple was among the first recruiting visits Dykes made after being hired at TCU. Johnston was considering hopping into the portal. His leaving would have been a huge loss.
Johnston’s parents were immediately sold on the new coach.
“He’s just warm,” Johnston’s father told the Athletic. “He’s easy to talk to. Just the way he carries himself. I like his disposition.”
That’s a description I can attest to, as well, after spending an hour and a half with the coach, who might have ultimately put himself in a corner.
How does one follow up first season in which you lead your team to the national championship game?
“I think in some way, yeah, probably [it makes the job more difficult],” Dykes says. “It certainly raises expectations, but I think that's a good thing. I really do believe that. We’ve got a lot of support from the administration, community, and fans, and we’re fortunate to have all those things, and, as a result, we should put a good product on the field.”
Says Estridge of the national championship game and the future: “It didn’t feel like the end-all because there was meat left on the bone at the end. This one felt like, ‘OK, we’re supposed to be here. We didn’t finish the job.’ I don’t think they’ve reached the pinnacle. I’m not willing to say that this was the greatest year in TCU football ever. I’m not willing to say that.”
Crystal Wise