Coach at No. 5 TCU insists he only needs to find way to win by 1, not pile on points

No. 5 TCU coach doesn’t sweat winning margins

FORT WORTH, Texas — TCU was coming off a one-win season when Gary Patterson arrived 12 years ago as part of the new coaching staff.

Any victory, even by only a single point, was enough to make the Horned Frogs happy back then.

Patterson has never really wavered on that feeling, but what others expect out of his program has certainly changed. No. 5 TCU, after all, has been a BCS buster, become a perennial Top 25 team and won at least 11 games four of the last five seasons.

“Everybody has high expectations, and you sometimes forget winning is winning,” said Patterson, a defensive coordinator-turned-head coach.

While winning by one or two points is still plenty for TCU, a margin of two or three touchdowns now sometimes isn’t good enough for everybody else — especially poll voters. The Frogs dropped in the AP poll after a 17-point victory last month.

“It just goes to show the ladder that we’ve climbed here at TCU,” senior receiver Jimmy Young said. “I think essentially it’s a good thing.”

For the second week in a row, the Frogs (5-0) are favored by nearly five touchdowns. They play Wyoming (2-3) on Saturday in the first of three consecutive home games.

TCU got its first road shutout under Patterson last weekend with a 27-0 victory at Colorado State, but it was only 6-0 at halftime and 13-0 late in the third quarter.

“If you stay in this business long enough, at some point you’re not going to have the team that you want to have and you’re going to get criticized,” said Patterson, in his 10th season as head coach. “Or you’ll have a team that you have and you’re not quite as good as everybody wants you to be.”

TCU remained No. 5 in the AP and USA Today coaches’ polls after the shutout at Colorado State. But a week earlier, after a 41-24 win at SMU, the Frogs dropped a spot in the AP poll and were passed by Oregon in the coaches’ poll.

After winning or sharing titles in three different leagues the past 11 years, and finally making it into a BCS game last season, the Frogs have gotten to the point where most outsiders believe they should be much, much better than most of the teams they play.

“Yeah, it’s a big compliment, everybody wants us to win big,” right tackle Zach Roth said. “Whatever happens happen. If we win by one point or by 20, we’re just going to go out and do the best we can.”

The Frogs have won 18 consecutive regular-season games and 31 of 34 games overall, including a loss to Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl last January. The other losses in that span were to sixth-ranked Oklahoma and No. 10 Utah.

During a 16-game home winning streak that goes back to the 2007 season, TCU has outscored its opponents by an average margin of 36 points. Since 1999, they are 58-6 at soon-to-be renovated Amon G. Carter Stadium with an average winning margin of 23 points.

Patterson isn’t one of the poll voting coaches this season so he’s not having to pay attention to teams he doesn’t face. He does know what Oregon State has done since losing to the Frogs in the season opener.

Oregon State’s losses are to TCU and Boise State — by nine points to the Frogs and 13 to the Broncos. But the Beavers are coming off a victory over Arizona State, which had already been in tight games with third-ranked Oregon and 20th-ranked Wisconsin.

Plus, after playing Wyoming and struggling BYU the next two weekends, the Frogs get to play two ranked opponents — at home against No. 25 Air Force to end their three-game homestand Oct. 23 and at 10th-ranked Utah on Nov. 6.

“Down the road, for us, you control your own destiny in a lot of ways,” Patterson sad. “(Utah) gives you an opportunity as far as a computer ranking and all those kind of things to give you a chance. I go back to the very beginning. If we just win, all that just takes care of itself.”

Even, he insists, if there aren’t a lot of lopsided victories.

“We’ve got seven games left. We need to try to find a way to win by one point,” he said. “And it starts this week against Wyoming.”