INGLEWOOD, Calif. — The experts and the oddsmakers aren’t convinced.
TCU may have pulled off the biggest upset in the history of the College Football Playoff by knocking off Michigan in the Fiesta Bowl as an eight-point underdog, but now the Horned Frogs must face Georgia. The Bulldogs are the defending national champion and the best team out of the big, bad SEC. The Horned Frogs’ role as the team that nobody expected to be here hasn’t changed.
They are massive 12.5-point underdogs for the title game Monday night at SoFi Stadium, the largest spread in the nine-year history of the playoff. But they don’t mind. It fits with this hard-to-believe season in which TCU started without a single vote in the Associated Press preseason poll and was picked to finish seven in the Big 12, yet reached the final game of the year.
“Absolutely, we use it as motivation, because why not?” TCU star receiver Quentin Johnston said this week. “It’s one of the main things I feel like has driven us to the success we’ve come to this year. So, honestly, [there’s] going to be a lot of outside noise, people projecting us to lose by however many points, but we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing and prove them wrong.”
It’s the ultimate David versus Goliath showdown. Undefeated Georgia has won 16 straight games and 30 of its last 31 to become the new Alabama — the heavyweight that doesn’t have to rebuild. TCU started the season at a whopping 200/1 to win it all. The team with the longest preseason odds to ever win a national championship was Auburn at 50/1 in the 2010 season.
TCU was 5-7 last year and switched coaches, replacing Gary Patterson with Sonny Dykes. Its quarterback, Max Duggan, started the season as the backup under a new coaching staff and went on to enjoy by far the best year of his career en route to finishing second in the Heisman Trophy race.
Somehow, the Horned Frogs didn’t just win the Big 12, but became the first school from the conference to win a playoff game and equal a program record with 13 wins. Now they will take on Georgia, the overwhelming favorite when the four-team tournament was announced.
All season, TCU has heard the same doubts. It wasn’t good enough. Eventually, it would fall off. The playoff wasn’t a realistic goal. It couldn’t beat Michigan. All the naysaying has become a rallying cry.
“I think the big thing for us as a whole, it just fuels us and kind of gives us a little more motivation to go out there and prove who we are and show what TCU is about,” linebacker Dee Winters said.
Dykes started to believe there was a unique quality in this group in October, after TCU beat Oklahoma and Oklahoma State in the span of three weeks. How his team reacted to very different first halves in those games was revealing to him. It held a huge halftime lead over Oklahoma and trailed Oklahoma State after a poor first half. On both occasions, there was a sense of calm, that only the second half mattered. The Horned Frogs didn’t get too high or too low on either occasion.
“That was when I thought, okay, this is a special group,” Dykes recalled. “These guys get it and there’s some maturity, and we might have something fun here.”
Fun would be significantly understating it. But it’s that even-keeled approach that has served TCU well, even as it is enjoying an underdog season nobody could’ve predicted. It will be important over the next few days, and into Monday night. For the Horned Frogs to have a chance to pull off the stunner of stunners, the moment — and noise surrounding it — can’t be too big for them.
“[There’s] just a general belief in each other and a belief that we’re good enough,” Dykes said. “I think that’s been the message really since I got the job here was we’re good enough. We’re good enough to compete. We’re good enough to win game one and we’re good enough to win game two.”
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