FORT WORTH – The best stories in college football begin with Mike Leach, and so does Sonny Dykes’ roots in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Dykes was on staff at Texas Tech in the early 2000’s when Leach walked into the wide receiver room to see where Dykes and fellow assistant Dana Holgorsen were planning out recruiting. 

Neither had much of an idea, so Leach took out a map. 

“He circled DFW and told me to go there and pointed to Houston and told Dana to go there,” Dykes remembered a day before his Horned Frogs left for Arizona and the Fiesta Bowl. “Dana and I still laugh about how funny it is that he is at Houston and I’m here at TCU.” 

DFW always intrigued Dykes. He bounced around as a kid following his father's, Spike Dykes, career path, until it eventually reached its destination as the head coach at Texas Tech. Dykes, who played first base in college in Lubbock, did what a lot of his buddies did after graduating in West Texas: move to DFW. He began his coaching career as an assistant at Pearce High School in Richardson, a suburb northwest of Dallas. His plan was to go to Southlake Carroll and lay down roots. 

“I got an offer from Bob Ledbetter, the head coach at Carroll at the time, to come work for him,” Dykes said. “I ended up Navarro Junior College instead, but I drove back to hang out with my buddies a lot. And when you’re recruiting those areas, you get to know the high school coaches. That still works in my favor.” 

A seed was planted during those recruiting trips. Dykes passed SMU and TCU often, and always made mental note of the potential of both jobs. He landed at TCU as an offensive analyst following a disappointing tenure at Cal. Dykes became the head coach at SMU in 2018 and remained until the end of the 2021 season. The Mustangs were 25-7 in his final three seasons – the best three-year span since the Death Penalty. 

“I always knew we’d have success in DFW because we’d be able to recruit that talent base from a close proximity rather than convincing them to go across the state, or even the country,” Dykes said. “The talent to compete for national championships is in our backyard. That’s something most colleges can’t say.” 

Dykes was right. He took over a TCU program that grew stale under legendary coach Gary Patterson. The Horned Frogs went 11-3 in that 2017 season that Dykes was in Fort Worth as an analyst. They were 23-24 in the four seasons between his departure as an analyst and his return as head coach in 2022. The New Year’s Eve semifinal against Michigan is the first time the program has played in the postseason since 2018 – well before most of the current roster graduated high school. 

It's no secret that DFW is known as a pro sports town. The Dallas Cowboys and Dallas Mavericks are likely the first teams to leave any native sports fans' tongue. But Dykes helped SMU build inroads into Dallas ISD and parts of the city that didn’t feel connected to the Hilltop previously. He’s doing the same at TCU. Both are private, Christian universities that don’t pump out 30,000 graduates a year. Dykes allowed spring practices to be open to the public after taking the TCU job to help foster community support. 

“I’m seeing a whole lot of purple around Fort Worth these days,” Dykes said. “I think people are excited about the football program, and just the university in general. There’s a lot of pride and support within our community.” 

That purple wave converges on Glendale, Ariz. this week. The team arrived on Christmas Eve and spent Christmas Day watching the Arizona Cardinals at State Farm Stadium – the home of the Fiesta Bowl on Dec. 31. The College Football Playoff semifinal is the biggest game in program history, and the most important football game for the DFW region since the Cowboys in the 1990s. 

TCU is the underdog in the four-team tournament. Michigan, Ohio State, and Georgia are history-rich football programs that have competed on the biggest stages across multiple decades in two different centuries. TCU wasn’t in a Power Five conference until joining the Big 12 in 2012. The glory days of the Southwest Conference were long in the rear-view mirror. 

The Horned Frogs want to join those yearly national conversations that the other three teams live. They were on the cusp of that in three of the four seasons between 2014 and 2017. And now they’re back. TCU signed 23 players last week to a 2023 recruiting class that ranks 20th in the nation. That’s the best class of any of the future Big 12 programs. 

“We’ve had a lot of success through the years but we’re not necessarily a big brand,” Dykes said. “You can basically predict the top 25 next year right now based on brand alone. The way you become a big brand is to have success on a consistent basis and to take advantage of the big moments. Saturday is one of those big moments.” 

Dykes and his Horned Frogs won’t run away from the pressure because they’ve handled it tremendously all season. TCU was 5-7 in 2021. No one outside of the locker room believed this team had national title hopes, and truth serum might reveal that most inside the locker room initially didn’t either. But as the wins kept coming, TCU never panicked. Dykes and his team embraced another gift from Leach – the power of confidence. 

“Mike had an undying confidence in his beliefs, his teams, and himself,” Dykes said. “That’s incredibly important to be good at anything. The way you develop that confidence is through consistent preparation. That way when you get into those tough situations, you’ve faced them before.” 

His team has done that all season. They've handled the highs and the lows, and that provides Dykes with an undying confidence in his Horned Frogs. He points to two moments in the 2022 season. The first was halftime of the Oklahoma game. The second was halftime against Oklahoma State. In both scenarios, Dykes was pleasantly surprised by the team’s maturity. 

“I expected to walk into halftime of the Oklahoma game and see our guys celebrate, just like I expected to walk into halftime of the Oklahoma State game expecting the guys to be screaming and yelling,” Dykes remembered. “But both times, the guys were coolly and calmly discussing the game and saying, ‘hey, none of that matters. Let’s go play the second half.’” 

That maturity was on display many times in 2022. The comeback wins over Oklahoma State and Kansas State in consecutive weeks in mid-October. The defensive destruction of Texas in Austin. The last-second field goal against Baylor. Even the overtime loss to Kansas State wasn’t without late-game exploits by the Horned Frogs. 

“We’ve handled the pressure well all season, so I don’t see why we’d get off track this week,” Dykes said with that undying confidence he discussed. “Michigan is a good team, but so are we. We’ve shown the maturity necessary to be in these types of battles.”