By JENNIFER FLOYD ENGEL
jenfloyd@star-telegram.com
Stephen Hodge leaned on his crutches, a Dallas Cowboys cap outing him as he watched TCU football practice with a couple of former teammates on Thursday.
Horned Frogs coach Gary Patterson had asked him to say a couple of words to this group in advance of this evening’s showdown between No. 10 TCU and No. 16 BYU, and Seahawks linebacker David Hawthorne and Ravens linebacker Jason Phillips were trying to coach him on what to say.
Biggest game of season? Shock the world? Stick it to The BcS?
What are you going to say, I ask, figuring a big finish awaits, filled with references to seizing moments and underdogs and usual big-game clichés.
"I’m going to tell them, 'Don’t get overhyped,’ " Hodge said. "This is Thursday and, by Thursday, you know everything you are going to know. Coach probably has it so all they had to do is see a look and know what BYU is going to do. So just go play."
There is a lot of wisdom in Hodge’s pre-speech speech, especially with as much hype as already has been heaped onto an already huge game with ESPN
GameDay traveling to Provo and bulletin-board brouhahas and revenge talk and Jerry Palm and his "Armageddon" junk. And that little thing about this quite possibly being the last, big hurdle between TCU and a big-money BcS game.
So the tendency is to go conservative in these games, to play not to lose and to not quite do what you had been doing. Almost every big-time coach has been guilty of this at least once, or in Mack Brown’s case a couple of times before he got Vince Young religion. Patterson seemed to have played this game a year ago against Utah in Salt Lake City with crushing results.
Not this season, not judging by Thursday.
"When you go on the road, you got to go and take the game," was what he said word for word.
Can I use that?
"Yeah, you can use it," Patterson said.
It is always dangerous adding subtext to a quote but the message he was sending was "we are not going to play scared." This is not to be confused with the false bravado of guaranteeing victories or underestimating BYU. What Patterson was doing was letting his team know that
GameDay showing up does not legitimize them, just as Palm giving them zero shot at a National Championship does not demean them. Who is he anyway? An overhyped statistician who is an expert in a fraudulent system.
How the Frogs continue to legitimize themselves as NC contenders is by doing what they have been doing for a while now, playing good enough ball to win a whole lot of games.
I was talking to a coach recently who knew The Redheaded Genius. We were talking about play-callers and specifically was Jason Garrett a good one. What he said was too much time is spent analyzing things that have nothing to do with anything, play-calling, revenge games, et al. It always comes down to who executes the best.
"I’ll take it one step further," Patterson said. "It has always been the most physical team that has won this ballgame."
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