FORT WORTH, Texas — TCU’s upset home loss against West Virginia is not what doomed Gary Patterson.
It was the loss the week before, at Oklahoma.
Although the Sooners were ranked fourth in the nation when they hosted TCU on Oct. 9, it was the way the Horned Frogs lost that administrators found so troubling.
The double-digit defeat next week at Amon G. Carter Stadium against the Mountaineers essentially finalized the decision that Gary Patterson’s tenure at TCU needed to end.
According to sources, a small number of influential boosters were not happy about moving on from the most important employee TCU has hired in the last 100 years. But it was a small number.
Since Patterson made the decision to “resign” on Sunday, a common criticism has been that TCU should have “handled it better,” or that they “should have let him go on out his terms.”
A debate can be had whether removing a coach of Patterson’s stature and success was the right decision, but there should be no debate how TCU handled this move.
On Tuesday at TCU during what normally would have been Patterson’s weekly press conference, athletic director Jeremiah Donati addressed an abnormally large number of reporters.
I asked Donati what he would say to anyone who says, “It could have been handled better.”
“It’s probably a fair criticism,” he said, “just because I don’t think anyone wanted it to end this way.”
And that is the problem.
No one wanted this regime, and this era, to end. Not just “this way.” Not any way.
The Gary Patterson era ending at TCU is the conclusion of a wonderful period of time, and moments, for so many lives.
There is no nice, soft, gentle way to conclude that without sadness.
“I thought we handled this very fairly. We could have gone through the season and hired a search firm, behind coaches’ back, would that have been fair?” Donati said.
To execute such a move would have required not only radio but internet silence. If so much as a fragment of a sentence leaked that TCU was vetting candidates to replace Patterson, Donati and TCU chancellor Victor Boschini would have been covered in slime for the rest of their lives.
They were up front with him, and let him know what was coming.
That’s the right way to handle it.
And they gave him a chance to coach the rest of the season, which he declined. And they were going to give him a cush’ job for the rest of his life, which he also declined.
Forget college football, few people in sports are given the chance to “go out on their own terms.”
They sustain an injury, or are forced out.
About the only element that felt unrealistic to this was Donati’s hope that Patterson would coach through the end of the season, and TCU would use that time to celebrate his career.
It’s hard to celebrate when you’re losing for a coach who knows he was shown a door he did not want to exit.
“If you know Gary that’s not what he wants,” Donati said. “I believe there will be a time to do that appropriately.”
The good news for Donati is that he doesn’t need to raise money to build a statue of Patterson.
Patterson will one day return and this finale will be forgotten. The countless high moments will be recalled and relished.
Since the announcement, Patterson has been in the TCU football offices, and tried to help interim coach Jerry Kill prepare the team for Saturday’s game against Baylor.
Patterson has reached out to friends, and ex-staffers.
It’s an emotional time for a man who arrived in Fort Worth as a member of Dennis Franchione’s staff in the early days of 1998.
Patterson is up. He’s down. He’s OK. He’s sad.
More than one-third of Patterson’s life has been in Fort Worth, and TCU football.
TCU gave him a chance to be a head football coach when few places would have extended such an opportunity to a quiet defensive coordinator who was not too comfortable in front of a microphone.
TCU gave him an opportunity for a life that he could not have imagined.
In that time, TCU knew no greater ambassador who loved the place and in turn loved him back.
He’s also a college football coach, and college football coaches’ tenures almost always end on sad, not happy, notes.
That’s all this is.
TCU arrived at the painful conclusion that this tenure needed to end, and while fans can debate whether that decision is the correct one how they did it was right.
