AFM RSS Feed Follow Us on Twitter       
AMERICAN FOOTBALL MONTHLY THE #1 RESOURCE FOR FOOTBALL COACHES
ABOUT |  CONTACT |  ADVERTISE |  HELP  



   User Name    Password 
      Password Help





Article Categories


AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


The Next Level

Following the success of former head coach Dennis Franchione, Gary Patterson’s intensity, professional experience and strong work ethic has helped take TCU’s football team -- along with it’s attendance and graduation rates -- to a whole new level.
by: Richard Scott
© More from this issue

Click for Printer Friendly Version          

There’s nothing obvious about Gary Patterson’s background that would suggest he could be one of the nation’s hottest college football coaches. There’s nothing that stands out on a life resume that starts with growing up in a small Kansas town, playing Juco ball on an academic scholarship, walking on and playing special teams for a perennial college football loser, coaching at places most college football fans have never even heard of and working his way up the coaching ladder one small step at a time.

Then one day, fans, media and other college football observers look up, and here is Patterson on national television, running, jumping, yelling, grinding, working, as his Texas Christian Horned Frogs win yet another game, contend for conference championships and threaten to crash the Bowl Championship Series party hosted by the big dogs of college football, and wonder, “where did this come from? How did he get here? What’s the deal with this guy?”

Here’s the deal: Patterson comes fully equipped with vibrant intensity, valuable professional experience, a strong work ethic, a genuine desire to raise his players the right way plus an affinity for playing the guitar and writing music, like a rugged pick-up truck with a tow winch, four-wheel drive, a loaded tool box and a decent stereo system.

He does not, however, come with his own silver spoon. He was raised without one. Never bothered to get one. Didn’t need it. Still doesn’t. It would only get in the way.

That didn’t keep TCU from elevating Patterson from defensive coordinator and giving him his first head coaching job in December, 2000.

“You can get a job because of who you are or you can get a job because of what you do,” Patterson says. “I got a chance to be a head coach here because of what I’ve done. Now, there are a lot of coaches out there who deserve to be head coaches, but it’s always a matter of timing and opportunity. I gained a lot of valuable experiences at all those stops along the way, like doing academics and financial aid and setting up travel wearing all those hats in Division II.

“You learn administrative skills, you have to be an Xs and Os coach, you have to be a recruiter, you have to be a good coach on the field and you’ve got to be able to raise money. Those are the five basic things you have to do to be a good head coach, and I think because of all the different places I’ve been, except for working hard and being on the field, I probably wasn’t good at any of the others. Most of us aren’t. All those experiences gave me a better understanding of all the things that go on.”

Since TCU gave him the opportunity to follow the success of former head coach Dennis Franchione, Patterson has rewarded TCU’s faith by going 27-11 and earning three consecutive bowls and two consecutive top-25 rankings and a conference championship in three years. In addition, football attendance and student enrollment are up, the school’s national profile is rising, the entire athletic program is headed for the Mountain West Conference in 2005 and Patterson received a new contract extension last spring that will take him through the 2008 season.

“It’s been so delightful to watch him grow and blossom as a head football coach, and I think he’s done a wonderful job,” TCU athletic director Eric Hyman told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Success is measured in wins and losses, that’s the bottom line. That’s how a lot of people measure it.”

Patterson would like to think it can be measured in other ways as well, including rising attendance, increased interest in the program and improving graduation rates. TCU was one of 32 institutions in Division I-A that graduated more than 75 percent of its players since the 97-98 academic year. While it’s true Patterson inherited a winning program from Franchione, it’s also true that Patterson and his coaches, with the support of the administration, have done their part to build an even stronger foundation that can withstand the loss of star players to graduation and injuries and continue to win at a high level, including 21 wins over the past two seasons.

As Patterson said two years ago in an interview with TCU’s school paper, The Daily Skiff, “I played at Kansas State; if you would have told me 18 or 19 years ago that the Wildcats would be going to the Cotton Bowl every year and beating Tennessee, I would have wondered what you had been smoking. I sense that we have more potential here. We’re sitting right in the middle of one of the greatest football states of all time.

“And that’s where my job comes in. I’m not a flash person. I’m not the guy who walks in the room and people say, ‘Wow, he’s the guy that ought to be running this or that.’

“My job is to keep people interested in TCU football, to win football games and to give people the dreams they have for the University.”

Patterson has made a lifelong habit of looking beyond the surface to see the special hidden quality in a player, a job or a situation. That started during his childhood in the south central Kansas town of Rozell, located west of Great Bend and south of Hays. Patterson’s father Keith leveled farmland for irrigation, and his mother Gail was a nurse. Together, they raised four children into a close-knit family and taught them how to work. A normal summer schedule meant rising early, working most of the day, taking a nap and then working until the sun went down. For entertainment, Patterson could go swimming in the Arkansas River or go see a movie which was a 45 minute drive at a single-screen theatre in the next town. Or, he could play ball.

Today, Rozell holds only 187 people and Patterson’s old school, Pawnee Heights High, plays Division II eight-man football. Back when Patterson attended Pawnee Heights, the school played 11-man football, the town was a little bigger and sports kept a kid busy and out of trouble.

“You played sports instead of driving a tractor, or whatever else you had to do,” Patterson says. “Plus, that’s where all the girls were – at football and basketball games and track meets.”

Patterson also worked hard enough in school to earn an academic scholarship at Dodge City Community College, where he redshirted one year following a knee injury and played in the secondary as a redshirt freshman. He then transferred to Kansas State as a walk-on with another academic scholarship and spent two years playing special teams for the Wildcats.

After one year as a graduate assistant, Patterson followed K-State assistant Gary Darnell (now the Western Michigan head coach) to Tennessee Tech.

“I just felt like coaching was my niche,” Patterson says. “I was a guy who made some all-state teams in a smaller classification in high school and starting out from where I did, I just figured I’d be a high school coach and teacher. Then Coach Darnell gave me an opportunity. I’m just one of those guys who’s never been a quitter and I’m probably one of those guys who has outlasted my competition and been fortunate to have people give me an opportunity. There were people like Fran, who gave me the chance to be a coordinator at the Division I level, and Charlie Weatherbie, who took me with him to Navy when I was with him at Utah State.”

After two years coaching linebackers at Tennessee Tech Patterson made a decisive move to the West Coast by taking the linebacker job at California-Davis, a historically successful Division II that has produced former head coaches Jim Sochor and Bob Foster, current head coach Bob Biggs and former assistants such as Oregon head coach Mike Bellotti, Boise State head coach Dan Hawkins, Oregon defensive coordinator Nick Aliotti, New York Jets offensive coordinator Paul Hackett and former NFL quarterback Ken O’Brien.

“That’s probably one of the most instrumental moves as far as my career,” Patterson says. “They’ve won a lot of titles, put out a lot of good players, had a lot of good coaches. There was a way of doing things where I came from in the Midwest, and they taught me some different things. They were playing with some undersized guys and they didn’t have any scholarships and they were playing scholarship players and giving themselves a chance to win with their schemes and how they treated people. It was an interesting time.”

Patterson also learned the foundations of the 4-2-5 defensive scheme TCU uses today. The fundamental elements of the 4-2-5 are based on the old eight-man front, but Patterson learned to adapt and adjust it to meet his team’s personnel and opponents.

“At Davis, it was a nickel package and passing concept and the blitzing concept,” Patterson says. “At Pittsburg State we used the 4-2 to stop the run and give us an eight-man front. You always have to alter it a little bit according to your conference. In the old WAC with BYU, San Diego State and all the wide-open offenses, we’re going back to in the Mountain West where we ran it as a nickel package with the passing and the blitzing. In Conference USA, it’s more physical with a few teams that throw it around, so we’ve had to do both. It gives us the flexibility of being ready for both.

“I’m one of those people who doesn’t want to wake up and not have any answers. I learned a lot of that at Kansas State, where our opponents had better people than us most of the time, so we had to be able to give our kids a slant, a blitz, a twist, change-up coverages, give our kids a chance to compete. Some people watch us and call it a little bit crazy, but my wife calls me that, too, and she still likes me.”

From there, Patterson’s career took him to Cal Lutheran (defensive coordinator), Pittsburg State (linebackers) and Sonoma State (defensive coordinator). Each stop played a part in Patterson’s growth. Even a few weeks in 1992 working without pay for the Oregon Lighting Bolts in a now defunct spring pro league taught him a valuable lesson.

“It’s one of those lessons learned,” Patterson says, laughing. “It’s like taking that one chance in the stock market on a high-risk stock and it doesn’t work so you just put it back in your pocket and say, ‘we’ll never do that again.’”

Patterson’s big break came soon after when Weatherbie hired him to coach the secondary at Utah State. He followed Weatherbie to Navy in 1995 and played a more national schedule for the first time. He then joined Franchione as the defensive coordinator at New Mexico in 1996-97 and learned to apply his system in the pass-oriented WAC/Mountain West. When the Lobos went 9-2 in 1997 and Franchione took over at TCU in 1998, Patterson came with him and helped establish a defense that would serve as the foundation for a team that rose from 1-10 in 1997 to 7-5, 8-4, and 10-2 over the next three years.

By the time Franchione left for Alabama in December, 2000, Patterson was ready to apply for the TCU head coaching job. He had come in second in the head coaching search at New Mexico to current Lobos coach Rocky Long and learned a lot from the process that he applied to the interview process at TCU. Franchione’s coordinators didn’t go out on the road recruiting, but Patterson still played a major role in the evaluation of defensive recruits. He also helped oversee the offseason program, directing from strength and conditioning to academics and the visits from hundreds of high school coaches that visit TCU each spring.

“Every place is different, the situation is different and the people are different,” Patterson says, “but the people who can change with the type of people and situations going on are going to be the one’s who will be very successful. It’s also the coaches who can maintain a very disciplined program but still understand the needs of the kind of kids who are coming out of high school now, the kids from one-parent and no-parent families.

“You’ve got to understand your role in helping them set goals and learn time management. Those are key issues if you want to stay in the profession, because a lot of times success starts with growing your kids up and not letting them rule the assignment, but still understanding their needs are important. You can win all the games you want to, but in five years if you haven’t helped a kid at least have a chance to be successful when he leaves then you’ve failed.

When TCU announced Patterson’s hiring, a lot of college football insiders had to ask “who?” Patterson understood.

“It’s always hard to get the first one, whether it’s that first assistant’s job, that first coordinator’s job,” Patterson says. “I’ll always be indebted to TCU.”

Franchione originally wanted to coach in the Mobile Bowl at the end of the 2000 season but TCU eventually decided to let Patterson coach it instead, even though most of the coaching staff was headed to Alabama with Franchione. It made for an awkward situation that didn’t improve when the Horned Frogs lost 28-21 to Southern Miss in the final seconds of the game.

Patterson went about hiring a quality staff with a mixture of experience and youth. Because he continues to work with the defense, Patterson made sure he hired veteran coaches for the offense, bringing in quarterbacks coach Dick Winder, a veteran assistant and former coordinator at Oklahoma and Texas Tech, as well as assistant head coach/offensive line coach Eddie Williamson, a former head coach at VMI and veteran assistant with stops at North Carolina, Georgia, Baylor and Wake Forest. He also promoted running backs coach Mike Schultz to offensive coordinator.

“Half of them are younger and half of them are older, so we have a lot of balance,” Patterson says. “It’s a really unique staff and it’s one of the big reasons why we’ve been successful, along with good kids. I just try to manage it.”

Patterson and his staff were put to the test immediately. After coaching his first game as a head coach in a bowl, Patterson opened his first season as a head coach at Nebraska, without 28 seniors who had completed their eligibility the season before, including All-American tailback LaDainian Tomlinson. The Horned Frogs also moved from the WAC to Conference USA that year. Combine all those factors with a 4-5 record that included a loss to Division I-AA Northwestern State, and Patterson quickly found himself on the hot seat with TCU fans and the media. “I told people it was going to take awhile for us to mature, as a staff and as a team,” Patterson says, “and that finally started to happen about halfway through the season.”

The Horned Frogs finally came together in time to beat both Louisville and Southern Miss late in the season and earn a bid to the galleryfurniture.com bowl. Patterson’s standing with the fans and the media didn’t improve when starting quarterback Casey Printers left the following January because he wanted to pass the ball more, and the situation turned from tense to worse when the Horned Frogs opened the 2002 season by blowing a 15-point lead in an 39-36 overtime loss at Cincinnati. That week, a local newspaper columnist wrote that if Patterson didn’t win that week at Northwestern he should be fired.

“I’ve always been one who put a lot more pressure on myself than everybody else did,” Patterson says. “As a coach, always know that if you’re someone who gets caught up in reading the paper or the Internet and you let all that get to you and you don’t sleep, you’re in trouble.

“We knew that first year when we came back late in the season to beat Louisville and Southern Miss to go to a bowl game that it was one of the best coaching jobs I’d been around. Then to come and blow the lead against Cincinnati and lose in overtime, we understood what was going on and what we had to do.

“But at the same time, we didn’t have a lot of time to think about it because we had played at Cincinnati on a Monday and we had to travel to Northwestern to play a day game that next Saturday. We didn’t have time to worry. We just knew we had a job to do and we went out and did it.”

The Horned Frogs won that game 48-24 and went on to win their next eight games, nine of their next 10 overall, and finished with a 10-2 record, a conference championship, a Liberty Bowl victory over Colorado State and one of the nation’s top-ranked defenses.

When TCU entered the 2003 season with only 11 starters in 2003 and lukewarm expectations from the pre-season polls, the Horned Frogs simply went back to work and opened the season with 10 consecutive victories, climbing their way through the rankings until they reached No. 10 in the national polls and forced a national debate on their place in the BCS standings. Before the debate could be answered, however, the Horned Frogs lost 40-28 at Southern Miss in late November.

This fall, his Horned Frogs are picked by some polls to win the C-USA title this year, and then the program will move to the Mountain West in 2005. Patterson is already concerned about the challenges that come in moving to a new time zone, both in terms of travel and regional and national exposure.

“The biggest thing I’ve learned about that is that you don’t worry about those things you don’t have control over,” Patterson says. “The only thing we can do here is just keep winning ball games, and if we keep winning ball games we’ll stay in the limelight anyway.”

Winning ball games means the Horned Frogs must continue to improve across the board, on and off the field. On the field, the TCU staff must continue to excel in the areas of player scouting and development. Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma and Texas Tech will continue to sign most of the obvious talent in Texas, so TCU must continue to look for undiscovered gems such as Tomlinson, whose only I-A offers came from TCU and North Texas. Since Tomlinson, TCU has produced two more 1,000-yard rushers in Lonta Hobbs and Robert Merrill, both of whom return in 2004.

“I feel like we’re earning a strong reputation in this state of being a great evaluation staff, finding guys outside the radar,” Patterson says. “The other part of that is the developmental phase. We still don’t put our coordinators on the road recruiting, because we want them running our offseason programs and academics. We also have a really good strength coach (Don Sommer) and we put a lot of emphasis on that. With just 85 scholarships, we feel like we need to grow kids up physically, but we also need to grow them up mentally, too, because some of them are going to have to play as redshirt freshmen. You have to start in January and not wait until August so we can help them through the maturity process and get them game ready.”

“We try to keep the chiefs at 20 percent and the rest at 80 percent, so you always have a team that’s a blue-collar, hard working team,” Patterson says. “We like to have guys like (defensive back) Jason Goss, a guy who was an overachiever and went to the Arizona Cardinals two years ago.”

Patterson has also helped an underachieving football program become more marketable over the past three years. Average attendance rose to 31,620 in 2000, the first time the Horned Frogs averaged more then 30,000 since the demise of the Southwest Conference, and then slipped when Franchione and Tomlinson left. However, the Horned Frogs drew 36,155 per game for six games last season. Between increased ticket sales and other football-related revenue and TCU’s fund raising efforts, the football program now has a new practice field built on a foundation that could someday be converted into an indoor facility.

TCU’s private-school enrollment of approximately 8,000 students barely compares to the enrollment at Texas and Texas A&M, but TCU’s athletic department has improved its situation by reaching out to families from the Dallas-Forth Worth metroplex. The Bleacher Creatures allows kids ages 6-13 to get involved with the program at home games, even running the length of the field with the TCU mascot before the game. The group included 50 kids when it started three years ago, and approximately 1,000 participated before last year’s final home game against Cincinnati.

“Every place is different and Fort Worth is more family oriented, so that’s the direction we’ve gone. We’re seeing more kids, more young people. We’re attracting the Texas or Texas A&M grad who loves football but they have a 3- and 5-year-old but they can’t get down to those games so now they’re coming to our games and becoming season-ticket holders.”

Patterson also does his part through public speaking and music. Patterson played in bands when he was younger, still writes music and favors anything from oldies to classic rock and country.

“Writing and being a musician and being a football coach is kind of contradictory, but that’s kind of my release,” Patterson says. “I can go home at night, pick up the guitar and play a little bit and not think about anything.”

Of course, Patterson will also be the first to admit that all the music, good intentions, graduation rates, public appearances and marketing in the world won’t mean a thing if the Horned Frogs don’t keep winning year after year.

“If I was an AD out there I’d be looking for a guy who has a connection with his kids, who takes academics seriously and still wins ball games. Someone who can balance all of it,” Patterson says. “But winning is still how you judge a good coach. People want to know if you’ve been able to be successful over the test of time, like a Joe Paterno, a Bobby Bowden, those people who have been successful over year’s in different situations.”






NEW BOOK!

AFM Videos Streaming Memberships Now Available Digital Download - 304 Pages of Football Forms for the Winning Coach



















HOME
MAGAZINE
SUBSCRIBE ONLINE COLUMNISTS COACHING VIDEOS


Copyright 2024, AmericanFootballMonthly.com
All Rights Reserved