TCU's Sonny Dykes at Home, Coaching 1st CFP Team From Texas

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Sonny Dykes was nearing the top of a season as an off-field offensive analyst, and pondering his next move.

Fired from his previous head coaching job and with three young kids at home, the son of longtime college coach Spike Dykes even considered a profession change after greater than 20 years in football. He had researched what he would want to do to get an actual estate license.

Five years later, the 53-year-old is settled in at home, in Texas, still doing what he at all times desired to do and is now near the height of his occupation with TCU (12-1) making it into the four-team College Football Playoff.

“It’s been numerous things, a culmination of quite a bit,” said Dykes, The Associated Press Coach of the Yr who’s in his first season as head coach at the varsity where he was a consultant for coach Gary Patterson in 2017.

The Horned Frogs, undefeated until an additional time loss to Kansas State within the Big 12 championship game, play Big Ten champion Michigan (13-0) within the CFP semifinal Fiesta Bowl on Saturday. They’re the primary Big 12 team apart from Oklahoma – and first from Texas — to make the CFP.

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“Being a Texas guy, the state of Texas means quite a bit to me, the history of school football within the state of Texas means quite a bit to me,” Dykes said.

That season working for the Frogs, after they made their only other Big 12 title game, was a chance for Dykes to get home after going 19-30 in 4 seasons at California. The job out West was never really a great fit for the folksy, Texas-born coach.

“I used to be looking around, attempting to get a job and trying to make your mind up … taking a job some place that I didn’t necessarily need to go, was that the direction I desired to go in,” he said. “I’ve obviously at all times wanted to educate.”

Then SMU offered its head coaching job, only about 40 miles and 4 years away from a return to switch Patterson at TCU. Dykes, whose first head coaching job was at Louisiana Tech, led SMU to 30 wins in its best four-season stretch because it became the one program ever shut down by the so-called NCAA death penalty three a long time earlier.

The Frogs went 23-24 during that very same time, and parted ways with Patterson even before the top of his twenty first season. Dykes was immediately considered the favourite to switch him, which happened after the regular season.

“I didn’t want them to take into consideration coming in and think this was purported to be a rebuilding 12 months,” Heisman Trophy-finalist senior quarterback Max Duggan said, recalling his initial conversation with Dykes. “We are able to win now. We’ve simply to fix numerous our issues, culture-wise and discipline and accountability.”

Dykes grew up within the Lone Star State, where his late father coached at several levels over 38 years. That included Spike’s 14 seasons because the helm of Texas Tech, where the younger Dykes played baseball, not football.

Sonny Dykes was a Texas Tech assistant for seven seasons, the primary seven after his father retired when on the staff of the late Mike Leach. He went west for the primary time as offensive coordinator at Arizona from 2007-09, then had a 22-15 record in three seasons at Louisiana Tech before taking the Cal job.

Now, Dykes is leading a TCU program that won its only AP national title in 1938, when quarterback Davey O’Brien was the varsity’s only Heisman Trophy winner. The Frogs, then still within the Mountain West, were 13-0 through the 2010 season that ended with a Rose Bowl victory and No. 2 national rating.

“Felt him form of all 12 months with me,” Dykes said. “He will surely get a kick out of our guys … what form of people they’re, since it’s a heck of a bunch and guys that I’m actually pleased with. I do know he’d feel the identical way.”

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