Sonny Dykes and TCU football plan to double down on DFW: ‘Every kid better consider TCU’
TCU football is branding itself differently under Sonny Dykes. The program is referring to itself as “DFW’s Big 12 team” on social media and is going all-in on recruiting local players.
The Frogs have already landed a couple of four-star receivers from the area who were once committed to SMU. Garland’s Jordan Hudson (2022 class) and North Mesquite’s Cardale Russell (2023 class) both committed to TCU within 24 hours of Dykes being named coach.
This is an intentional effort by the new staff as it plans to re-establish itself within the Texas recruiting hierarchy. Former coach Gary Patterson was widely respected as one of the top defensive minds of this generation but he leaned toward more out-of-state recruits than in-state in recent years.
As Patterson said a couple years ago, “To be honest with you, we have more respect outside the state of Texas than we do in.”
Well, that mindset has changed with Dykes on board. And that proved to be a key selling point with Dykes emerging as the man for the job. A prominent high school coach in the area told the Star-Telegram recently that Dykes and his staff have done a terrific job building relationships with high school programs throughout the state.
That caught the attention of TCU athletic director Jeremiah Donati, who made the hire.
“When you start looking at the numbers, and you start looking at the talent in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex that wasn’t coming to TCU, I just marveled at what SMU has been able to do the last couple of years,” Donati said Tuesday. “It really became glaring when you took a look at the numbers and the guys we were missing out on.
“We’re not going to get every kid in Dallas-Fort Worth, but every kid better be considering TCU. With the investments we’ve made, the level we play at ... we’ve got to be high on everyone’s radar.”
Dykes spent the 2017 season as an offensive analyst under Patterson, and loved what he saw from the program. He felt a connection between the school and the city. Even residents who didn’t attend TCU gravitated toward the program and cheered on the team.
TCU becoming known as “Fort Worth’s team” is what Dykes tried to implement with SMU and it being “Dallas’ team.” Now he hopes to expand TCU into becoming DFW’s team from a recruiting and branding standpoint.
“It’s been a process to get here but this city loves TCU football,” Dykes said. “We have a lot of friends who graduated from different schools that went to all of these different places that have season tickets and come out to support TCU. I think that was the thing that we had to do at SMU was to try to get that done, try to buy into the level that Fort Worth had. There’s an incredible synergy between Fort Worth and this university.
“I just thought what an incredible support system that is here. I think that’s what universities are supposed to do. They’re supposed to serve their communities. I always had that feeling that TCU got that, that it served the Fort Worth community and the Fort Worth community responded to that and supported TCU. A lot of that stuff that we did at SMU really came from the idea and what I saw existed here and Fort Worth.”
This story was originally published December 1, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
