TCU Football: What Did We Learn From The Baylor Game?

Another loss, another week searching for answers. At some point, a good week of practice isn't enough when the results don't show on the field. Where does the coaching staff go from here?

TCU fans flying the Hypnotoad flag during the Baylor game 11/02/2024 / Tony Beblowski, KillerFrogs

Four losses on the season. Four losses, with two coming in complete meltdowns of the program and the other two losing to the program's biggest rivals. Do you know what each loss has in common, however? Three simple words.

"We were outcoached."

TCU Head Coach Sonny Dykes has uttered those words after all four losses this season. In a game against arguably your most prominent rival, you were outcoached by Dave Aranda, who started the season with the highest odds of being the first coach fired this season. After a while, saying the team had a really good week of practice becomes just words, words the fanbase is tired of hearing. The results aren't driven by who has the best week of practice but by what the results on the field show, and fans are still waiting for those results to culminate.

The coaching staff is desperately searching for answers. All season, the talk has been that if Josh Hoover could cut down on his turnovers, this team would dominate games, and even in Hoover's best game of the season, it still wasn't enough.

This has been the story of this season. Nothing has been enough. In games where the offense shows up, the defense doesn't, and vice versa. The defense gets worn down in games that are absolute wars and close despite having a great week of practice. The inconsistencies hurt this team—the inconsistency of the players, the coaches, and the game plan.

Dykes talks about the 4th-and-nine situation with less than a minute in the game, saying that he was unsure if Baylor was going to go for it, yet linebacker Johnny Hodges said they all knew the Bears were going to go for it. Hodges talks about the fact that they had not been able to stop the run all game, and the Bears already had issues kicking the ball, so they knew they would go for it in the situation. So, how is it that the players on the field knew what would happen, but the coaching staff didn't have a firm opinion?

Before the season started, Sonny talked about how last year he felt that he and the rest of his coaching staff didn't do enough to prepare the guys for their games, but he vowed to change that this season. Now, nine games in, we see the same results from the previous year. There are only three more games left in the season for the Horned Frogs; it's too late to correct the path now and the team's glaring issues this season.

Maybe this is what the program has become. A fanbase lost in the woods guided by someone whose compass only works six times a year, but you never know when those times will be—searching for answers, trying to find the reasoning behind the madness when the answer was always right in front of you the whole time.

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