Patterson: TCU’s vision made it a ‘great addition’ for Big 12

As a handful of schools vie to win a spot in Big 12 expansion, TCU coach Gary Patterson said what made his school a good choice four years ago for the conference was that it already had “enough vision.”

During a news conference Wednesday to highlight the start of practices this week, he said TCU was building toward Power 5 status before it was a Power 5 school.

“I thought TCU was a great addition,” he said, asked by reporters about the league’s expansion search. “Why was it a great addition? Because we already had enough vision. We were building a new stadium. We were changing our facilities already, and not when we came into the new conference. We were changing everything we were doing academically, enrollment stuff, all of that was happening. We were a good choice.”

Patterson said it’s up to expansion candidates to improve themselves and not count on conference affiliation.

“It’s not the conference’s job to make that university better, it’s the university’s job to make the conference better, whether it’s in football, academics, whatever it is,” he said.

He declined to talk about expansion candidates individually — “You don’t see my Twitter feed if I talk about one and not the others,” he joked — but he cautioned against overreach in geography.

“I’ll play whoever they decide they want me to play and go from there, but I would prefer not to get home at 6 o’clock in the morning like I used to do in the WAC and the Mountain West,” he said. “When you played a night game, you got done at 12 o’clock at night, it’s 2 o’clock at home, and you’re getting home at 6, and then we’re asking our kids to practice in the afternoon. That was difficult.”

OTs sidelined

Patterson said offensive tackles Bryson Henderson and Trey Elliott will miss the season, although he didn’t say why.

Henderson and Elliott were slated to be the backup tackles, Patterson said.

“It’ll come down to redshirt freshmen and freshmen,” he said. “But they’ve been here awhile. We’ll see how that turns out.”

Special teams

Patterson called punter and kicker “probably our biggest concern,” but he said special teams overall are the best it has been in some time.

“Our depth, our numbers, our length, our size is probably better than it has been in a while,” Patterson said. “That’s probably a positive when you start the first day of camp, the kind of numbers of guys that can play.”

He said the return to health of linebacker Sammy Douglas was important.

“He was one of the biggest pluses we had, just how he covered special teams,” Patterson said.

Jonathan Song and Adam Nunez are the new place-kicker and punter, respectively, after four years of Jaden Oberkrom and Ethan Perry.

This story was originally published August 3, 2016 at 8:02 PM with the headline "Patterson: TCU’s vision made it a ‘great addition’ for Big 12."