For the first time in 13 years, the Big 12 has a team fighting for a national championship. The fact that it's TCU that's breaking the drought stands as one of the more interesting case studies in the history of the sport, writes DanWolken.
Rewind to July of 2021. By all outward appearances, college athletics was in a period of conference stability. Commissioners of the five power leagues were on the verge of approving a plan to expand the playoff from four teams to 12. Everyone in the sometimes dysfunctional family of college sports seemed happy.
These were very real questions, particularly for a school like TCU that spent 16 years in the conference realignment wilderness after the breakup of the Southwest Conference. When the Horned Frogs finally landed an invitation to the Big 12 in 2011, it felt like they’d made it back to the big time. Was it all about to be taken away once again?
Since then, the only Big 12 school to make the playoff was Oklahoma, which the Sooners did four times with three blowout semifinal losses and one overtime loss to Georgia in the epic 2017 Rose Bowl. Instead, TCU’s success combined with stunning levels of mediocrity from Texas and Oklahoma this season is more than validation for the remaining and incoming members of the Big 12 — it’s the first salvo in what looks like a new era of stability, and perhaps even respect for what the league can offer in its future form.
And the simple truth is that staying in the Big 12 with this setup and this much momentum makes it far likelier that the Horned Frogs get back into the playoff before either Texas or Oklahoma, who will have to climb over a whole lot of elite SEC programs to get in a position even close to this favorable.
TCU has spent most of its football history as the third or even fourth wheel of the Longhorn-Aggie rivalry, never big or threatening enough to upset the traditional balance of power. Even when the program reached historic highs like going undefeated and winning the Rose Bowl after the 2010 season, it was more of a niche story than part of the mainstream football culture in the state.
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