For a head coach who says he doesn’t have time to read anything that’s written or said about his football team, TCU’s Gary Patterson sure seems to know a lot about what’s being written and said.
Latest example: this week’s get-together with the local media, when Patterson was asked whether he was “concerned” about his offense failing to score a touchdown in the first 60 minutes last Saturday.
Well, Baylor didn’t score any touchdowns either, Patterson noted.
But the coach sensed what was behind the question.
“I know there’s a lot of voices out there,” he said. “You can always make changes, but it’s like a divorce. How many people you think the percentage is that once they got divorced and remarried that it was better than the first one?
“So you’ve got to make sure that everything lines up the way it’s supposed to line up, if you’re going to make changes. And you know how I am — I don’t do any of that evaluating until I get to the end of the year.
“I think it’s in poor taste when people get fired in the middle of the season. It affects everybody, not just that person. You take a cog out of the middle of everything that goes on.
“And that’s not saying that I’m doing anything. I’m just saying to you that it’s not fair to anybody because right now you’re trying to win ball games, and that’s just a distraction. And we’ve had enough distractions and different things going on this season for us to add one more.”
For the record, the name “Sonny Cumbie” was not mentioned in Patterson’s lengthy discourse. But we all know who and what Gary was talking about.
The Horned Frogs are 2-4 in the Big 12 and seventh in the conference in total offense.
My friends at KillerFrogs.com think they have the solution. The forums there have beaten the drums all season for Patterson to replace Cumbie.
The problem with fan forum chatter, though, is that it comprises a relatively minute percentage of its self-assumed vox populi. The perception, therefore, that Patterson is responding directly to his internet critics is a false one. If the coach acts prickly after a game or at his Tuesday media gatherings, trust me that his internet complainers are far down the field of intended targets.
Instead, one surmises, Patterson’s people bring him things, nuggets of third-party disapproval or opponents’ published slights.
I’ve never seen the Frogs’ locker room bulletin board, so I can only imagine. “See? They hate us,” I imagine the coach pointing and saying.
With a Saturday visit to Texas Tech coming, Patterson’s focus is to edge one victory closer to becoming bowl eligible. Whatever helps that cause is fair game, I guess.
As Patterson emphasized Tuesday, there will be no midseason coaching changes.
“The next three weeks, we just need to try to win ballgames,” he said, “and then see where it all sits.”
You can read into that what you will, but I walked away Tuesday semi-surprised that Patterson so elaborately addressed the topic.
A simple, standard vote of confidence for the offensive coordinator would have ended the discussion. But there are a lot of loose ends involved, as well as maybe four more games and another month of football to be played, not to mention a national signing date.
Should Cumbie be doing a better job? He likely would be the first to tell you he absolutely should.
But as I’ve written before, his quarterback, Max Duggan, is a true freshman and still only 18.
Patterson recalled an episode from long after last Saturday’s three-overtime loss to Baylor.
“I went back through the locker room and he was still sitting down there,” Patterson said. “He’s not a kid that says, ‘Oh, we lost, now I’m going to go to a party.’ It’s really important to him to be successful and for us to be successful.”
Duggan didn’t have the luxury of a redshirt season before being thrust into the Big 12 fire.
“Here’s the thing about the quarterback thing,” Patterson said without being asked. “Everybody’s had their say all year. So let me just say this to you:
“Probably Max never comes about if Mike Collins doesn’t get hurt and doesn’t have surgery and then he doesn’t go through all of the two-a-days.
“If Shawn Robinson hadn’t left, you probably wouldn’t have taken a grad transfer (Alex Delton), because in spring everybody else was hurt except for Max. And Justin Rogers wasn’t ready.
“So we basically probably played the hand as good as we could play it,
and we’re going to keep playing it for three ballgames.”
Is Duggan the next Andy Dalton or the next Trevone Boykin? We don’t know but, as Patterson pointed out, neither Dalton nor Boykin were star quarterbacks when they were true freshmen, either.
And it was Cumbie who recruited Duggan, the head coach added.
“He recruited (Matthew) Baldwin, Justin Rogers — they all came here for a certain reason,” Patterson said. “You guys have to be careful what you wish for.
“All I do know is we’ve always made good decisions. I’ve tried to do my business decisions like a lot of the older families in this city, the people that have taught me in this city how to do things. They don’t make rash decisions. In this case I’m not going to, either.
“Change is change. If you have to do that, whether if it’s a quarterback, a defensive back or his coach, it’s what we all have to do. Out of fairness to everybody, you do what you do to win.
“That doesn’t mean change is the reason why you get better. Those are things I have to determine.”
In the meantime, the Frogs have a date with Texas Tech in Lubbock on Saturday. Their locker room bulletin board, no doubt, has been cluttered with motivation.
For the next three weekends at least, Patterson has a football team to coach. And only then, he insists, he’ll see where it all sits.
(Photo by TCU Athletics)
