From Homecoming to Hypnotoad: The Baylor vs. TCU Rivalry Has Seen It All
What is the best darn football rivalry in the state of Texas? The long-lost Texas Longhorns and the A&M Aggies Thanksgiving showdown? The relatively new and petty NFL squabble between the Cowboys and the Texans? What about the western, Friday Night Lights mystique of Odessa Permian and the school formerly known as Midland Lee?
These are all subjective and the answer will change depending on what logo is on the hat of the person you’re asking, what their zip code is or what sticker they have on the back of their truck. I can’t tell you which one is the best or the most heated, but when it comes to college football in this great state, no two Texas teams have played more than the Baylor Bears and the TCU Horned Frogs.
They have changed conferences, home cities, stadiums and mascots, but they have always had each other. For over 120 years, they’ve played. War, monsoons, and death on the sidelines couldn’t stop them.
There’s hate, jealousy and plenty of overlap between these two institutions that are practically carbon copies of each other. It’s a rivalry that has been revived time and time again and this Saturday’s 118th matchup of the “Revivalry” at McLane Stadium brings no shortage of storylines and, of course, tradition.
Someone will get the bragging rights of a victory this Saturday, which is more than we can say about the first matchup between these two, a 0-0 tie between Baylor and the AddRan Christian Horned Frogs, a full 15 years before Doyle Thrailkill’s submission of the Bear won the student vote for the school’s first mascot. No one knows where or on what date that game was played, but they made sure everyone knew about the 0-0 tie.
For all of their meetings between 1899 and 1910, Baylor and TCU were actually cross-town rivals as the Horned Frogs didn’t set up shop at their current Fort Worth home until their Waco campus burned down. The year before the devastating fire, however, brought another landmark game in the rivalry.
On Thanksgiving Day 1909, Baylor invited their alumni back to campus for a feast and to watch the football team play the Horned Frogs. To mark the occasion, students and alumni added a bonfire, a pep rally and a parade, making it the first collegiate Homecoming in the United States.
For the third time that fall, the Horned Frog football team made the cross-town journey from North 18th Street to Carroll Field, smack in the middle of Baylor’s campus, and took to the gridiron.
The third meeting was the charm for Baylor. After being shutout in each of the first two games against TCU that year, Baylor won the first Homecoming game, 9-6.
Baylor started cleaning up after that, winning six of the next seven in the rivalry, including a 52-0 beatdown in their next meeting, which is still the largest margin of victory in the Revivalry’s history.
TCU took the mantle in their glory days of the 1930s, slingin’ Baylor to the woodshed in a 28-0 victory in their 1935 national championship (if you’re buying the Williamson Poll, whatever that is) season, its first of two that decade.
The series took a brief break after the Bears won 10-7 in Fort Worth on Halloween 1942. War hadn’t stopped them from taking the field that year, but soon thereafter, many of the players were shipped off to tackle the Axis powers in Europe and the South Pacific.
The teams largely battled as Southwest Conference foes for who would be less mediocre for the next few decades, with few heart-stopping moments. That is, until 1971. Jim Pittman was in his first year at TCU after leading Tulane to an uninspiring 21-30-1 record in five years when he suffered a heart attack on the sidelines of what was then called Baylor Stadium.
Pittman died in a Waco hospital that very day.
In an equally unbelievable turn of events, the game continued. The Horned Frogs learned of their coach’s death at halftime and TCU won, 34-27. In an age where we now see accusations of dead people voting in seemingly every election, TCU coach Jim Pittman actually got credited with a victory when he didn’t even live to see the clock hit triple zeros.
What’s more, Pittman’s death didn’t even make the lede of the New York Times’s game report. As great as Steve Judy’s four-touchdown performance was, I’m not so sure his heroics were the story of the day.
Anyway, it’s this writer’s hope that Judy’s family has that clipping somewhere and, for what it’s worth, both teams prayed together with the 30,000 in attendance after the game when Pittman’s death was announced over the PA.
Legendary Baylor coach Grant Teaff, who will be in attendance for Saturday’s game, went 16-5 against TCU in his 21 years at Baylor, highlighted by an eight-game winning streak over the Frogs, the longest such streak Baylor has had in the rivalry.
Once the SWC disbanded and Baylor joined the Big 12, the tides of the rivalry turned a little more bitter and turned once again in TCU’s favor.
Horned Frog fans were rightfully upset when Baylor got the Big 12 invite whereas TCU, a school comparable in size, stature and athletic prowess, had to settle for relegation to the lowly Mountain West Conference. TCU might have lost the battle but won the war when their head coach, Dennis Franchione, left for Alabama in 2000, and they promoted defensive coordinator Gary Patterson to the top position.
Patterson was hell-bent on two things: bringing TCU to national prominence and beating the crap out of the Baylor Bears. Unfortunately for Baylor fans, he did both.
The first three cracks Patterson got at Baylor, his Horned Frogs picked them apart, winning all three games and outscoring the Bears 89-17. In 2010, he knocked out both of his goals, pummeling Robert Griffin III and Baylor 45-10 in Fort Worth and finishing the season in Pasadena as undefeated Rose Bowl winners.
Looking to add more icing to their purple cake, TCU’s next game after the Rose Bowl came at Floyd Casey Stadium in Waco and became one of the most legendary contests in the history of the Revivalry.
The Horned Frogs were one of the hottest programs and brands in college football and scrubby little Baylor had only one winning season in the previous 17 years. That little-known Bears quarterback who the fans dubbed “RG3” threw for 359 yards and three touchdowns in a 50-48 upset victory that sparked Griffin’s successful Heisman Trophy campaign and officially revived the Revivalry.
The game reached its peak in the coming years, as Art Briles’ relentless offense turned the Bears into a national powerhouse and Patterson’s stingy defenses (and eventual high-powered offense) ushered TCU into the Big 12 and into the national discussion.
Patterson and Briles loathed each other, the fan bases were back at each other’s throats, and in 2014 it all came to a head. In the first-ever ranked matchup between these two great rivals, Patterson looked to have outclassed the offensive genius as TCU held a 58-37 fourth-quarter lead at a nearly silent McLane Stadium. Then, Baylor revived.
The Bears got up off the mat as quarterback Bryce Petty led four straight scoring drives and Chris Callahan kicked the game-winning field goal that “shocked TCU and the entire country” as the fans stormed the field in one of the wackiest, most shocking results college football had ever seen.
The Revivalry had made it.
Two top 10 teams battled it out to one of the most entertaining college football games in recent memory and these two small, private, Christian schools who played little brother to the Texases and Oklahomas for so long shared the conference championship (don’t ask this Baylor alum his opinions on that one) and were the first two teams left out of the inaugural college football playoff.
They have played some classics since, like TCU’s 28-21 overtime victory on a 4th and 1 stop in barely playable monsoon conditions in 2015 or Baylor’s 29-23 triple overtime win in Fort Worth to keep their undefeated season intact in November 2019, and the game has always stayed relevant.
As McLane Stadium turns into a sea of green and purple Saturday, the No. 4 Horned Frogs will try to keep their playoff dreams alive as they take on what looks like a much inferior 6-4 Bears team looking to play spoiler.
It’s cliché in sports rivalries, but if the Revivalry has taught us anything in the last 123 years, it has taught us that literally, almost anything can happen when these two teams meet.
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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.