Like heads of state and CEOs, head football coaches generally want to leave a legacy. Big wins, bowl trophies, maybe a conference title (or even more) if your timing is right. Few accomplish everything they set out to do, but the successful ones rack up some moments and hardware along the way.
For Gary Patterson, who stepped down as TCU's head coach Sunday after 181 career wins and nearly 21 years in charge, his legacy was more than that: It was visible.
Look at the stadium in which the Horned Frogs play.
Granted, Amon G. Carter Stadium was erected long before Patterson was born. It housed the teams of Dutch Meyer's glory days in the 1930s, when Sammy Baugh and Davey O'Brien were slinging the ball around in a reasonably modern-looking spread offense. But it didn't look like this when Slingin' Sammy was behind center.
In August 2010, after TCU's second straight top-10 national finish and months before a 13-0 run and Rose Bowl win, the school announced funding for a massive renovation for the old stadium, one that would be completed in 2012. In 2019, after three more top-10 finishes, the east side of the stadium underwent its own renovation and expansion. It is a modern house for a modern football team, and the money would not have come about without Patterson's success.
Look at the conference logo that adorns the turf.
Promotion and relegation don't exist in college football. Well, relegation sometimes does. Just as Cincinnati and other Big East programs lost their power conference status when the Big East lost members and became the American Athletic Conference a decade ago, half of the Southwest Conference was left without a home when Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor left to join the nascent Big 12 in the mid-1990s.
TCU, doomed by both politics and a long spell of ineffective play -- the Horned Frogs hadn't finished ranked since 1957 -- first landed in the Western Athletic Conference for five years. In 2001, after Dennis Franchione led them to 10 wins and left ever so briefly for Alabama, Patterson, his defensive coordinator, took over and led TCU into Conference USA. Four years later, they were in the Mountain West.
Wherever they lived, they thrived. They won shares of the 1999 and 2000 WAC titles, the 2002 C-USA title and four MWC titles from 2005 to '11. They finished 11-1 and 11th in the AP poll in 2005, their best season in 46 years. Then they finished seventh in 2008, sixth in 2009 and second in 2010. Patterson took over after TCU's best season in ages and proceeded to raise the bar for a decade straight.
When conference realignment played out in the beginning of the 2010s, the timing couldn't have been better for TCU. The Big 12 lost four schools and added two: the Big East's West Virginia and TCU. Almost no one gets promoted to a power conference, but the Horned Frogs did. And in their third year in the Big 12, they damn near made the College Football Playoff.
Look at college football's base defense.
Patterson made his living on the outskirts of college football. He played for Dodge City Community College and then Kansas State, the ultimate college football outsider, in the early 1980s. His first full-time coaching job was at Tennessee Tech, and he moved on to UC Davis, Cal Lutheran, Pittsburg State, Sonoma State and the Professional Spring Football League's Oregon Lightning Bolts before landing his first semi-mainstream job with Utah State in 1992.
By the time he took the New Mexico defensive coordinator job in 1996, he had developed a unique defensive philosophy. He inserted extra speed by replacing a linebacker with a third safety, and he separated the assignments of the front six from the back five. His defenses were flexible and multiple, capable of honing detailed and devastating game plans for each opponent and adapting to any attack it had to face.
With some adjustments, Patterson's 4-2-5 also proved to be the perfect defense for handling the modern spread offense. He came to TCU as coordinator in 1998 and immediately improved the Frogs from 89th to 37th in defensive SP+. By 2000, they were third. They finished in the top 30 15 times during his time in Fort Worth, both winning games and creating proof of concept for defending with five defensive backs. His TCU defense was both aggressive and sturdy, capable of filling every run gap required and flying to the ball. He has had as much influence on modern college football defense as almost anyone in the game. And while his 2021 defense was a disaster, the Frogs were 16th in defensive SP+ just last year. Even as college football moved toward his philosophy, he was able to find success.
Look at the statue that stands outside the stadium.
In 2012-13, the Frogs' first two seasons back in a power conference, they went just 11-14. The 2013 season was particularly frustrating: Quarterbacks Casey Pachall and Trevone Boykin had combined to complete just 58% of their passes with 17 interceptions, and TCU crumbled to 88th in offensive SP+. Four one-score losses had led to a 4-8 finish.
In 2014, Patterson overhauled everything. He brought in Houston offensive coordinator Doug Meacham and Texas Tech co-coordinator Sonny Cumbie to modernize the Frogs' attack, and it paid off immediately. Boykin threw for 3,901 yards and rushed for 707, and TCU leaped to 17th in offensive SP+. They scored at least 37 points in 10 games and surged to 12-1, losing only to Baylor and barely missing out on the CFP. After the snub, they took their frustrations out on Hugh Freeze's Ole Miss team with a 42-3 thumping in the Peach Bowl. They followed that up with an 11-2 season in 2015.
TCU didn't wait until Patterson's tenure was over to decide it had seen enough. The school erected a statue of Patterson outside the stadium in 2016. He backed that decision up with another top-10 finish in 2017.
Patterson transformed TCU football in every possible way and, with his defensive philosophy, changed college football as well. The Horned Frogs have enjoyed 15 seasons of double-digit wins in their history, and he was a part of 12 of them.
They lost their way offensively in recent years. As they found a little bit of traction on that side of the ball in 2021, the bottom fell out for the defense. The Frogs are 3-5 and staring down their second sub-.500 finish in three years. Their 11-win run in 2017, which brought Patterson's sixth top-10 finish, ended up being his last big run. Because time is undefeated, he showed plenty of old-coach tendencies, complaining about the changes to the transfer rule and the transfer portal and vaguely accusing coaches in other leagues, without substantiation, of offering his players NIL compensation to transfer. TCU's roster depth seemed to dissipate, and the tactical edges began to vanish with it.
The ending always comes sooner than you'd prefer, but there was very little else for Patterson to accomplish. Whatever he chooses to do next -- finding another head-coaching job, signing on as a defensive coordinator, becoming a country music star -- his legacy is set at TCU. In fact, it's everywhere you look.