Sonny Dykes, a guy with a résumé full of have-not jobs, now is running a have
FORT WORTH, Texas – Sonny Dykes would be the first to tell you he had a sweet deal at SMU. He made good money. He could walk from his house to the football office. He spent time and energy recruiting talent in the mother lode of Metroplex high school football. Dykes made the Mustangs relevant again. He would tell anyone who asked he had never been happier in 27 years of coaching.
So he left.
Dykes not only left, he went 30 miles down I-30 to SMU’s biggest rival.
Dykes wears the purple of TCU now. He’s in a Power 5 conference. He can compete for a national championship at TCU. He can coach in front of more than 60,000 fans in the Big 12. He can walk into the indoor facility, see the turf is worn, and the next week a crew is ripping it up.
“We said, ‘Hey, look, we need to replace this. It’s going to cost a pretty good chunk of money to do it,’ ” Dykes said. “They were like, ‘Sure, let’s do it.’ So that part’s been awesome.”
There is wonder in his voice. A guy with a résumé full of have-not jobs is running a have. Look at the list of FBS jobs Dykes has had – Kentucky to Texas Tech to Arizona as an assistant, Louisiana Tech to Cal to SMU as a head coach. There isn’t a bell cow in the bunch.
And now that Dykes has a chance to win big, the rules have changed.
Taking over a program never has been easy – new place, new players, new administration – but in the past two years coaching has gotten a lot harder. If the players don’t like you, they can leave. You know how coaches talk about recruiting every day? These days, the new coach first must recruit his new locker room.
TCU went 5-7 last season. When Dykes arrived in late November, he couldn’t depend on bowl practices to get a look at his team. He scheduled three winter conditioning sessions before the holiday break. He had 37 absences.
“I was a little shocked,” Dykes said. He laughed in the comfort of March, when spring practice had begun. “I was very concerned. There was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of angst.”
A lot goes on after a season these days. Players decide whether to go pro. Players decide whether to go play at another school. When you’ve played half the season with an interim coach, and you don’t know the new coach, you may not rush to do his bidding.
Even a player like Tre’vius Hodges-Tomlinson, TCU royalty, no-showed a workout. Hodges-Tomlinson, a two-time All-Big 12 corner, is the nephew of a university trustee – LaDainian Tomlinson. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.
“It’s a very familiar place,” Hodges-Tomlinson said. “It’s the first place I always wanted to go to and had dreamed of being at.”
Hodges-Tomlinson didn’t go to the workout because he huddled with his family about his future. If he had decided to play for another team in 2022, it would have been in the NFL.
Dykes and his staff didn’t sit around and cross their fingers. Over the holiday break, a dead period in recruiting, they fanned out to recruit their roster – sort of like shopping your closet, except that your sweaters can’t leave on their own. Given the Omicron surge, some players and their families politely declined. But the selling worked. When the Horned Frogs returned to school in January, they committed. They had a total of one missed conditioning session. And now spring practice has begun.
“As of now, I’m liking how things are going,” Hodges-Tomlinson said. “I’m not really trying to find somewhere else to play. I’m ready to play with my teammates.”
Dykes expects by the time the team reports in August, TCU will have 33 players who weren’t Horned Frogs a year ago. It may be that in the transfer portal era, 40 percent turnover becomes the norm. It means that Dykes is seeing as many as 30 prospects a day come through the Justin Athletic Center, some high school guys, some portal guys.
That may be an accident of geography, given the sheer amount of football talent in Texas. But it also may be that Sonny Dykes’ never-met-a-stranger, fling-open-the-doors personality is just what is needed at a program trying to regain its Big 12 footing. Dykes and his staff make sure that high school coaches and players feel welcome on campus, from clinics and non-official visits to savvy social media.
Dykes’ approach is 180 degrees different than that of his predecessor, Gary Patterson, who never owned a wagon he couldn’t circle. Patterson won 181 games in 21 seasons and took six teams into the top 10. His methods worked for a long time. But the longer he stayed at TCU, the fewer local players he signed. In the six years from 2010-15, the Horned Frogs signed 134 players, 104 of them from Texas (77.6 percent). In Patterson’s last six years, the Horned Frogs signed 138 players, 69 of them from Texas (50 percent). The won-loss records reflect the difference.
Patterson left the same way he coached – he’s gonna show them. He’s now a special assistant on Steve Sarkisian’s staff at Texas. TCU is Sonny Dykes’ team. In his 13th season as a head coach, for the first time in his career, Dykes has the resources he needs to win at a big-boy level.
One other thing: Of the 14 players in the Horned Frogs’ 2022 recruiting class, 10 are from Texas (71.4 percent).