Time for the Frogs to Show Their Work

Sonny Dykes managed to salvage 2024. Now he has to prove he has been building a foundation, not making a bubble destined to burst.

Building a winning college football program requires patience many schools don’t have.

Constructing a roster with the depth and talent to compete consistently takes years of work in recruiting. In this age of player mobility, a new head coach can have immediate success for a year or two by building a win-now team through the transfer portal. But establishing a sustainable, year-to-year winner requires success in the long game of identifying, recruiting, developing, and retaining your own talent.

Many coaches don’t get the opportunity to do that. Fail to get results in the first two years and boosters and administrators get antsy. The coach is on the hot seat in their third year and maybe out before their fourth, before their first recruiting class even reaches their senior year.

TCU head coach Sonny Dykes looked to be on that trajectory, as unlikely as that might have seemed after reaching the national championship game in his first year at the school. But after going 5–7 in 2023 and the starting 3–3 in 2024, he seemed like he was out of answers, and the end seemed inevitable. The question was just whether it would get bad enough for TCU to send him packing in 2024, or if the school would wait and let him enter 2025 on the hot seat.

Instead, the Frogs went 5–1 down the stretch to finish the regular season 8–4. Their only loss came by 3 points on the road against a resurgent Baylor team. Then to cap it off, they signed the Big 12’s top recruiting class and the No. 23 class nationally.

There are reasonable questions to ask about how much Dykes and his staff have actually fixed, or if they simply benefited from one of the weaker schedules in the conference down the stretch. But either way, Dykes bought himself more time, a coach’s most valuable commodity.

Now he has to show how he’s been spending that commodity so far.

In Year 1 at TCU, Dykes maximized the potential of a roster assembled by Gary Patterson’s staff and plugged the holes with productive portal players, propelling TCU to the College Football Playoff and a semifinal win over Michigan. His first recruiting class in Fort Worth, hastily assembled in the few weeks between his hiring and early signing day, mostly developed in the background.

In Years 2 and 3, most of Patterson’s impact players finished their eligibility or left early for the NFL. A few of Dykes’s own signees were ready to contribute, but not enough to fill all the gaps. So Dykes brought in large influxes of transfers in a bid to stay competitive in the short-term while he continued recruiting and developing for the long-term. Some of those portal players delivered, but having to rely on so many meant every misevaluation or injury hurt even more.

In Year 4, TCU faces another major roster shakeup. The Frogs are set to lose at least 15 players who started games in 2024 to graduation, the draft or the transfer portal. There are 27 seniors listed on the 2024 roster before possible injury redshirts or NCAA waiver applications.

2024 TCU Starters Expected to Depart

This is the point, after four signing classes, where the balance of production has to tilt toward TCU’s homegrown prospects. This is the point where Dykes’s abilities as a program builder — or lack thereof — are going to become obvious.

The Frogs are losing their three top receivers from this season. Are young players like Jordyn Bailey, Dozie Ezukanma and Gekyle Baker ready to get some of those targets? Could this recruiting class’s headliner, 4-star Terry Shelton, contribute right away?

On defense, TCU is losing multi-year starters at linebacker and safety. Players like Jonathan Bax, Max Carroll and Jordan Lester are heading into their third year in the program. If things are going according to plan, this would be the moment where they step into larger roles.

Kaz Kazadi’s strength and conditioning program was the subject of fawning praise during that playoff run in 2022. Next season would be the ideal time to demonstrate that he’s been helping the Frogs’ younger linemen on both sides of the ball build the mass and athleticism to control the line of scrimmage instead of getting pushed around like they have for most of the last two years.

It’s not like the Frogs have gotten nothing from their recruiting classes under Dykes. Quarterback Josh Hoover (a class of 2022 signee) and defensive lineman Markis Deal (class of 2023) have shown the potential to be stars. Injuries were a factor in keeping some promising young players like Paul Oyewale, Vernon Glover and Micheal Ibukun-Okeyode off the field in 2024.

And TCU should certainly look for depth and some starters in the portal, as every team should in this era. But if your only reliable answer to replace departing production is going shopping for transfers, what on God’s green earth are you doing in player development?

A realigned Big 12 with no dominant power and an expanded playoff field should make TCU’s path toward contention easier, particularly if the Frogs have a talent advantage over the rest of the conference. But pulling in the top class in the Big 12 doesn’t matter unless you can turn those players into contributors on the field.

There’s a new complication for Dykes’s timeline as well: he’s about to have two new bosses.

TCU athletic director Jeremiah Donati is reportedly heading to South Carolina. TCU recently announced it will have a new chancellor next year too, with current president Daniel Pullin taking over for longtime university head Victor Boschini. Those shifts in leadership might protect Dykes in the short-term since the school will want those positions solidified before making any major decisions about the direction of the football program.

However, those changes also mean neither of the people who will be above Dykes in the org chart will be the people who picked him for this job. That could make Dykes easier to jettison if things aren’t going well, because doing so wouldn’t be a referendum on their own decision-making.

With the volatile state of the sport–including player revenue sharing on the horizon, which will eat into athletics budgets, and the roster turnover that happens when coaches leave–TCU would probably be grateful not to have to make a call on Dykes any time soon. Programs across college football are hesitant to fire coaches at the moment, with only four power conference jobs open this year. In most cases, schools are deciding it makes more sense to try to make things work with their current guy, or at least wait for his buyout to go down.

So heading into 2025, Dykes needs to prove that he is worth trying to make things work; that he’s been building a foundation to compete in the Big 12 with his own players. Otherwise, the clock will run out quicker than he expected.