Are Baylor Bears Cursed Against TCU?
In September 2004, the Boston Red Sox had won 25 of 30 games before playing two of their next series against the hated Yankees. Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez was the losing pitcher in two losses to New York that week and uttered a now infamous quote.
"What can I say? I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy."
The Baylor Bears could say the same thing about the TCU Horned Frogs.
Since the classic 2014 matchup simply known as "61-58" when the Bears came back from down 21 points in the second half to stun the Horned Frogs on a last-second field goal, Baylor has beaten their rivals from the north just once. I was in high school in 2014 and now am off my family's insurance plan and in that time, Baylor has beaten TCU once.
What makes this cloud of purple voodoo over Bear Country so perplexing is just how absurd the record is. Before the 2014 game, the all-time series was deadlocked at 51-51-7 and now the Frogs own a five-game lead. This is not like having a losing streak against Oklahoma or Texas before the parity of college football we see today, these are two evenly matched programs and one has a hex over the other.
Moreover, we have seen just about every kind of mismatch and matchup you can think of between these two teams since 2014. Baylor has been the better team, TCU has had the better team, they have both sucked, they have both been "mid" and every way around those combinations and there has been one constant - Baylor's inability to beat TCU.
The one win the Bears nabbed in that time was in 2019 when they were undefeated at 8-0 and powering towards a playoff berth and needed both a last-second, 51-yard game-tying field goal (to even the score at 9-9) and three overtimes to beat a 5-7 Horned Frogs squad.
It has almost taken on an air of the supernatural as if Baylor is cursed to the point of never beating TCU again. Droughts are one thing, Baylor didn't beat Oklahoma until 2011 because one team was bad and one team was good. A curse is something entirely different, it is taking the act of losing and raising it into an art form. It's an annual practice of the "almost, not quite, next year is the year!" It's the feeling I got when I saw an unranked TCU squad blow the doors off OU earlier this year and knew for a fact that would beat the then-16th-ranked Bears. It's the sick and cynical certainty that no matter what you do, you won't beat them.
I'm from a family of Red Sox fans if you couldn't tell, so it's somewhere in my blood to know what this is like.
Take 2015, for example. Both teams are good, inside the top 20. In hurricane-type rainfall, the Bears and Frogs struggled to hold the ball and a punt fest put the game into overtime. On 4th and 1 and down a touchdown, the number one offense in the country, the ones that averaged 37 yards more of offense than the next best team, was stopped. A historically great offense couldn't get one measly yard.
In 2016, a 4-4 TCU team went into McLane Stadium and pounded the No. 17 Bears into submission to the tune of 62-22. The next matchup in Waco saw both teams come in with losing records, but the Frogs were down to their third-string quarterback Grayson Muhlstein, who went just 11-15 through the air and muscled the Frogs to a 16-9 victory.
In 2021, the Bears were once again waltzing towards a Big 12 championship and potential playoff appearance when TCU's all-time wins leader, Gary Patterson, abruptly resigned amidst a 3-5 start. Under interim coach Jerry Kill, the Frogs had to turn to freshman quarterback Chandler Morris for his first collegiate start. Unfathomably, Morris threw for over 460 yards and beat the No. 5 ranked Bears, 30-28.
Saturday, the Bears were poised for one of the biggest upsets in program history. Up 28-20 with just over two minutes left, the students all filtered down to the lowest section of McLane Stadium in order to storm the field after the final whistle. Even after TCU scored, they missed the game-tying two-point conversion. Baylor still lost. It was inevitable.
Since the 2014 TCU game, Baylor has beaten Oklahoma three times, Texas three times, Texas Tech six times and Oklahoma State six times. They have beaten TCU once.
The final part of that Pedro quote reads as: "I wish they would disappear. I wish they would disappear and never come back. I'd like to face any other team right now.''
That 2004 season ended pretty well for Martinez and the Red Sox and were able to exorcise their curse and embarrass the Yankees a year after their most gut-wrenching loss against them. Maybe, just maybe, for Baylor and their curse against the Horned Frogs, next year is their year.
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Covering Baylor for Inside The Bears and the Locked on Baylor podcast. You can follow me for more Baylor content at @realcamstuart on Twitter. Originally from Rockland, Massachusetts and a Baylor alum, so I might mix the occasional bias and/or Boston sports tweet in there every once in a while.