TCU students in love with their unbeaten team – and with Hypnotoad, too

There are a lot of reasons No. 7 TCU has captured the imagination of its student body.

There’s that ranking, which goes hand-in-glove with the 7-0 record.

There are the four consecutive wins over ranked teams, the last three come-from-behind.

There’s Sonny Dykes, the second-generation coach who happens to be the biggest college football fan from Fort Worth to Fort Stockton.

There’s quarterback Max Duggan and running back Kendre Miller and a punt return team that has yet to allow a punt return and the purple Hypnotoad and –

How’s that again?

Yeah, the Hypnotoad, straight out of the late, great sitcom “Futurama,” has been adopted and stylized as the official unofficial mascot of the Horned Frogs. Dykes and Duggan have worn Hypnotoad gear to news conferences in recent days.

“If anything I’m wearing is trending,” Dykes said, laughing, “it’s not a good sign. It’s a bad sign.”

There’s also an “It’s Always Sonny in Fort Worth” T-shirt, with a cartoon Dykes in headset and sunglasses, arms folded. All of the swag is indicative of the fresh marketing that has TCU students falling in love with their football team. The Horned Frogs have played four home games, and each game has set a record for student attendance at Amon Carter Stadium.

Last Saturday night, 6,489 undergrads saw TCU rally to defeat Kansas State 38-28. That may not sound like a lot of students to you, but that’s nearly two-thirds of the undergrad population, which is a lecture hall or so above 10,000. If you can get two-thirds of your student body to show up anywhere in a good mood these days, you got it going on.

“Geez, I don’t know if there’s a secret sauce,” TCU athletic director Jeremiah Donati said. He and Dykes cited university chancellor Victor J. Boschini Jr. as setting the tone for a university administration that pays attention to its students and what drives them.

“The customer service at TCU, when it comes to the students, is really good,” Dykes said. “It’s the best anywhere I’ve ever been. They take care of the students. Students are always a priority.”

There’s the TCU Frog Army on campus, and there’s the partnership that Donati created with Barstool, the media company that speaks the irreverent language of college kids everywhere.

While the rest of Texas froze amid the Great Power Outage of two winters ago, @TCUBarstool promoted a snowball fight on the campus Commons. About 5,000 people showed up. That caught Donati’s attention.

“All it took was one tweet and they had people showing up,” he said. “It’s one thing if I send out an email saying that we have a promotion. To some of these kids, it probably sounds like the teacher from ‘Peanuts.’ But these kids have influence.”

Barstool can be edgy, the grownup word to describe smart-asses. But Donati made a deal with TCU Barstool: Don’t embarrass us, and we’ll work together. So far, so Hypnotoad. Or take the “UNDEFEATED” T-shirt and hoodie on sale this week. It’s the TCU Horned Frog standing over Kansas State in the pose of the famous Neil Leifer photo of Muhammad Ali over Sonny Liston.

“Young people know best about what young people want,” Donati said. “We need to rely on them. They are our boots on the ground.”

Dykes thinks the fervent feeling for the football team is a carryover from the TCU men’s basketball team, which made the Big 12 Championship Game last spring and took second-seeded Arizona to overtime in the second round of the NCAAs. He took his 5-year-old son Daniel to three games that ended with Daniel storming the court with the rest of the students.

Keep in mind that all we’ve heard for more than a decade across college sports is that student attendance has been declining. Inconvenient game times dictated by TV and uncompetitive games conspired to leave students uninspired. Four years ago, Alabama coach Nick Saban ranted about students not coming to a 56-14 rout of Louisiana. “If they don’t want to come, they don’t have to come,” Saban said. “But I’m sure there’s enough people around here who would like to go to the games and we would like them to come, too, because they support the players.”

Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne said Wednesday that student attendance hasn’t been an issue lately, in part because Alabama has gotten better game times – three night games this season. He expects it only will get better now that Alabama is rebuffing neutral-site games in favor of home-and-home matchups with the likes of Texas, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Florida State and Ohio State, and that’s just the next five seasons.

Tennessee’s 11,000 student tickets are in great demand, but that’s from a student body of about 25,000. You want market saturation, go to Fort Worth. The Horned Frogs students are in love with their football team. And purple Hypnotoad. His T-shirt and hoodie now on sale reads “Frogs by 90.” They may not get there Saturday at West Virginia, but they’ve got a good chance of getting to 8-0, with even bigger goals awaiting in November and beyond.