Patterson displeased, but adjusting, after TCU defensive showing

One bad game on defense is one bad game on defense. TCU coach Gary Patterson has had them before.

But he still doesn’t take them all that well.

“Not happy. Still not happy,” he said Tuesday at his media luncheon.

So when he said the day before that Arkansas might have 1,000 yards and 1,000 points on Saturday if the Horned Frogs didn’t improve over last week, it wasn’t just exaggeration. It was a call-out.

“That’s the challenge,” defensive end James McFarland said. “Coach P is really good at challenging us, making us feel like any time we’re underperforming, we need to do better. When he says stuff like that, we just feel like, ‘OK, well, how can we not allow that to happen?’ ”

Did it offend his players?

Ha. Who cares.

“It don’t matter,” Patterson said, asked Tuesday by a young reporter about how the team reacted to his comment. “I’ve been telling them they’re not very good for a long time. Before you were probably born. How old are you?”

The line drew laughs, but Patterson pressed on.

“If I let you, you could just come out to one of my practices. You probably wouldn’t hear that many positives,” he said. “Key is, if you want to be great, there’s no such thing as ‘OK.’ They know how it is. They’ve been here a long time. A lot of those guys have already been with me, and so they know as well as I do. You’d be a lot more upset with me if I told you, ‘We were OK, there was nothing really wrong, we’ll tackle better, we’ll play better.’ ”

Last week’s uncomfortable 59-41 victory against South Dakota State has Patterson thinking hard about his defense, a group expected to lead the way early in the season thanks to seven returning starters, an eighth from 2014 (McFarland) and other emerging talent.

Instead, it’s the side of the ball with questions after one week.

“We weren’t satisfied,” McFarland said. “We gave up way too much. They scored too much. It goes back to us having to go back to work and work on some things that let’s say we didn’t do a good job of in the first game. It starts today as far as attention to detail, little things, being accountable.”

McFarland, who missed last season with a broken toe, had his first sack in two years, and the Frogs collected four in all. Defensive tackle Aaron Curry forced a fumble that McFarland nearly scooped and scored — “if I had two good hands, I would have had it,” he said.

But it took nearly the entire game before South Dakota State succumbed to the TCU defenders.

“Just by watching Sunday’s practice, I would tell you if they weren’t listening to me, they are listening to me now after getting a chance to watch film,” Patterson said. “I expect them to play better than what we did the first game. But we had that kind of ballgame against that kind of motion stuff against SMU last year.

“If we want to win more ballgames than we lose, we’re going to have to get a lot better doing the things we need to do. And really, the thing that was probably the most disappointing was we didn’t tackle very well.”

But Patterson’s been there. McFarland has been there. The other TCU veterans have been there.

Bad games happen.

“Coach P has been around way longer than I have, but in my time here, we definitely have had games where sometimes the coverage that was called didn’t work out or sometimes the game plan didn’t really benefit us,” McFarland said. “But any time you can just be one point higher than your opponent, that’s a good feeling.”

Patterson is not sitting still. He said backup linebacker Ty Summers will probably start Saturday because of the poor tackling ahead of him.

Patterson again gave credit to South Dakota State’s scheme and playmakers, receiver Jake Wieneke and tight end Dallas Goedert, and said he probably overplayed some players who had not practiced much in fall camp.

But his mood about his defense was clear. Asked how his two senior defensive ends, McFarland and Josh Carraway played, Patterson said, “They did OK.”

He paused.

“I wasn’t real happy with anything defensively, to be honest with you,” he said. “They did OK. They finally showed up at the end of the game. But they didn’t show up — we didn’t show up — the first three quarters. They handled some of the new stuff that they did running game-wise. But they were just OK. We’ll all have to play a lot better as a whole to beat the teams we’ve got to beat going forward.”

Again, a pause. And a half-smile.

“But what’s new?”

This story was originally published September 6, 2016 at 4:56 PM with the headline "Patterson displeased, but adjusting, after TCU defensive showing."