Two years later, TCU again in position to ascend against Oklahoma

Everybody at TCU remembers two years ago.

Just about everybody.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gary Patterson said. “That was a long time ago.”

Maybe in a coach’s mind, but TCU’s 37-33 victory against Oklahoma on Oct. 4, 2014, is hard to forget.

Not just because it was a great game — four ties and two lead changes, the last on Paul Dawson’s pick-6 — but also because the victory over the then-No. 4 Sooners signaled the start of a two-year run for the Horned Frogs as national title hopefuls.

By year’s end, after a 12-1 season and share of the Big 12 championship, many players credited that game for convincing them they were that good.

“We know we can play with them. We’ve seen it,” TCU defensive end Josh Carraway said.

Now it’s come around again. TCU has Oklahoma in Fort Worth on the first Saturday in October.

The circumstances are different — No. 21 TCU is the ranked team this time, and between them, the Frogs and Sooners are 4-3 combined, not undefeated.

But the stakes are the same, at least for TCU. Beat OU, and a path to the conference championship opens.

“You don’t really have to say much,” Patterson said. “Oklahoma, obviously conference title-wise, most of the years the Big 12 has been in existence, it goes through Norman.”

Oklahoma has won the Big 12 title nine times.

Since joining the Big 12, TCU is 1-3 against Oklahoma. The games have been close. But only in 2014 did the Frogs break through.

“It just goes to show the history is there and we’ve beaten them,” Carraway said. “We know we can play with them.”

All time, TCU is 5-10 against OU. The average score is 21-17 Oklahoma.

One of the five TCU victories, in 2005, was 17-10 in Norman against a fifth-ranked Sooner team. It sparked an 11-1 season.

“I just give credit to the seniors back then,” Carraway said. “They’ve been able to instill that to younger guys every year and pass along that feeling that, ‘At TCU, we can play those guys.’ They’ve instilled the confidence and the willpower that we can go out there and play with anybody. I think a lot of that goes back to the older guys that were here to get that momentum started. And it’s kind of carried on.”

The Frogs and Sooners come in this year on different wavelengths.

TCU is 3-1 and played its best game of the season last week in defeating SMU 33-3. Oklahoma is 1-2 after a bye week spent nursing a pair of Top-10 defeats against Houston and Ohio State.

Both TCU and OU will be thinking far more about their present state than two years ago.

“This is not the team that was 23-3 the last two years,” Patterson said. “This is the team that’s this year. So you can’t dwell and you can’t live off what you did last year or the year before or back in 2005 or whenever it was. And they’ve got to want it worse than I do. At some point in time, you have to have ownership.”

Leave it to newcomer John Diarse to get the picture. He wasn’t in Fort Worth in 2014. But he knows what Saturday means for 2016.

“One of the key things that struck me about this program is the type of work and the drive that this team has,” the transfer receiver from LSU said. “And I believe that we’re ready for the Big 12. We obviously have some more things to work on. But we’re going to take it one game at a time. The next ballgame is OU. Got to take care of business.”

Maybe it will be remembered later.

This story was originally published September 30, 2016 at 11:59 AM with the headline "Two years later, TCU again in position to ascend against Oklahoma."