Outgoing TCU athletic director addresses football team’s bowl destination, controversy
Jeremiah Donati has been introduced as the new athletic director at South Carolina, but he remains tying up a few odds and ends with his “old” employer before he moves east.
This includes a variety of details with the TCU football team, specifically its upcoming bowl trip to New Mexico.
Reached by phone on Tuesday evening by the Star-Telegram, Donati asked to wait to discuss the specifics of his exit to his new job. He did address the topic of anger among TCU fans who are upset that “he is the one” responsible for TCU rejecting an invite for the football team to play in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis.
“We were never offered the chance to play in the Liberty Bowl,” Donati said, “and had we been offered, we would have accepted the invite.”
That’s all he would say on the topic.
TCU will play Louisiana in the New Mexico Bowl in Albuquerque on Saturday, Dec. 28. Plenty of good seats are available. If you call now, they may just let you take a few snaps at slot receiver.
Donati can’t say it, nor can anyone associated with the university or current members of its football team, but an invite to the New Mexico Bowl is tube socks for Christmas. Even if they win, what do they win?
Short of offering to buy every single ticket in the Liberty Bowl, TCU had to take the best bowl offered. This invite says nothing about the quality of TCU’s team, and everything about TCU’s size. Bowl invites can be a challenge when your enrollment is the smallest in the Big 12.
Before the bowl schedule was announced, there was considerable speculation that TCU didn’t want to go “back” to the Liberty Bowl, in Memphis, Tenn. The pull of Graceland just isn’t that big for a college football team, but Gibson’s Donuts would land any plane.
TCU last played in the Liberty Bowl in 2016, where it lost to postseason nemesis Georgia, but the final score was much closer than 65-7. TCU’s other notable postseason trip to Memphis came in 2002, when then coach Gary Patterson scored his first bowl win, over Colorado State.
For the potential bowl games that would be available for 8-4 TCU, its preferences were Phoenix, for the Rate Bowl, Houston’s Texas Bowl, and then the Liberty. They went 0-for-3. New Mexico wasn’t on the wish list.
Donati would have said yes to the Liberty Bowl without hesitating; when it comes to “bowl perception,” whatever that means, Liberty > New Mexico.
Nothing about this invite appeals to a fan base that expects more. Not the name of the game. Not the city. Not the opponent. Not even the time the game starts; it’s not even in prime time, but rather lunch time.
Of the four Big 12 teams that finished 8-4, TCU was treated “the worst.” Kansas State (8-4) will play Rutgers in Rate Bowl. Texas Tech will play Arkansas of the SEC in the Liberty Bowl. Baylor will play LSU in the Houston Bowl.
All of those sound more appealing than University Stadium in Albuquerque in late December for a date against a team from the Sun Belt.
The development is a hard right turn into “WTF?” for a program that won five of its final six games; had a handful of plays gone their way against Baylor and Central Florida, TCU would have made the Big 12 title game.
TCU’s only chance around this bowl destination was to pull the type of old school moves it did more than 20 years ago when it started to heavily invest in football.
Beginning in 1998, TCU’s leadership, with the aid of a few major boosters, most notably Malcolm Louden and Dick Lowe, both of whom are now gone, routinely approached bowl and ESPN executives and offered to over-pay to be in a certain bowl game. They wanted the exposure.
The willingness to spend is the reason why TCU landed in the 1998 Sun Bowl, an upset win over Southern Cal. That win is often credited as a launching point to the long run of success that remade the university.
If TCU had any chance to be invited to the 2024 Liberty Bowl over a Texas Tech, or to Houston Bowl rather than Baylor, it would have had to revert to that path of offering to pay to play.
Kansas State, Tech and Baylor are all bigger schools that offer a slightly better chance at a bump in attendance; and bowl directors want butts in seats, and the chance for better TV ratings.
If there is an opaque lining to this downer development for TCU, most bowls that are not affiliated with the expanded playoff bracket are all the same. With the exception of the Alamo Bowl, Gator Bowl and Holiday Bowl, is there much difference between the Houston Bowl and New Mexico Bowl?
Is there that much difference between the Pop Tarts Bowl and Pinstripe Bowl? They’re all white noise in living rooms, something to have on in sports bars, more content for ESPN, another chance for a gambler to make back what they lost the previous evening.
They bowl dates of this level are the chance for the sixth-year senior to play a football game in front of his family for the last time.
They’re all cheap-ticket events where multiple sections of stadiums are empty. They’re also not going away.
They are now all dates that top players duck, are loaded with backups because of the transfer portal, and coaches use for what amounts to a spring game in December.
The Liberty Bowl was not TCU’s first choice, but, as it turned out, it had no choice.
This story was originally published December 12, 2024 at 4:00 AM.
