TCU football’s claim to being tops in Texas rings more and more true

TCU football is coming off another 11-win season (the second in three years), and TCU basketball faces only its second true road game of the season so far Wednesday night in Austin.

Got to thinking about all that and more, and it’s in this week’s “Three Things I Think, Three Things I Know.”

Check it out every Wednesday.

(Here is what I thought and knew last week).

Three Things I Think

1. Travin Howard is going to go down as the greatest tackler in TCU history. But his reign as the leading tackler in TCU history might not last a year. Fellow linebacker Ty Summers is 72 tackles away from the 343 Howard posted in a career that ended two weeks ago with his second Alamo Bowl Defensive MVP award. Summers has played in 41 games at TCU. Howard reached his tackle total in 38 games.

2. TCU is an underrated road team in basketball. The Horned Frogs are 7-1 in their past eight games on neutral courts and 2-0 in their past two true road games, at Iowa and Baylor. They have won every tournament they have entered except one under Jamie Dixon. That was last year’s Big 12 tournament, where they reached the semifinals for the first time thanks to a win against Kansas at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, which itself has to rank somewhere between neutral and true road.

3. Dixon’s goal of 10 turnovers a game, or less, for TCU, is pretty lofty. Anything under 10 has a chance to lead the nation. But over the past six games, the number is 9.8 for the Frogs. That’s close to one of Dixon’s best marks at Pitt. His 2014-15 squad ranked 10th in the country with 9.9 turnovers a game.

Three Things I Know

1. TCU was not far from a 3-0 start in the Big 12. Seven more points would have done it (two against Oklahoma, five against Kansas). That’s no more than four buckets for what two weeks ago was the nation’s second-best shooting team. The Frogs have since dipped to 14th in that category, from 52.7 percent to 50.5. With four more buckets, they lead the Big 12 and are on a 20-game winning streak.

2. Vladimir Brodziansky has a chance to set a TCU school record in just three years, but it will be close. The senior from Prievidza, Slovakia, is fourth all-time in career blocks for the Frogs, 30 shy of James Penny’s school-record 171. TCU will play 17 more games at a minimum, meaning Brodziansky needs 1.8 blocks per game for 172. He’s at 1.7 per game now.

3. As the sample size gets bigger, TCU’s claim to being the best college football program in Texas rings more true. Since 2001, TCU has 160 wins, six more than Texas in that time. The Longhorns can play a trump card with their Vince Young national championship. But nobody else is close. Houston and Texas Tech are next at 129, then A&M at 123. Over a nearly 20-year period of games by the teams in Texas, it’s TCU and UT, then everybody else

This story was originally published January 10, 2018 at 5:38 PM with the headline "TCU football’s claim to being tops in Texas rings more and more true."