FORT WORTH, Texas — TCU’s football program had quite the conference-hopping journey on its way to the national championship game.
The Horned Frogs won or shared titles in three leagues over 16 seasons after the Southwest Conference disbanded. The small private school was left out when four other Texas schools joined the Big 12 in 1996, too.
“It’s like that old song by Hank Snow, ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ — our fans, they’ve traveled all over the place,” said John Denton, the kicker for the Horned Frogs’ 1984 Bluebonnet Bowl team who has been part of their radio broadcasts since 1988.
They sure have — all the way from the East Coast to Hawaii, with stops in the Western Athletic Conference, Conference USA and the Mountain West Conference before finally getting an invitation to the Big 12 in 2012. They are now the school located the closest to the Big 12’s headquarters in North Texas, after being either the easternmost or westernmost team in other conferences.
The long journey by TCU has taken the third-ranked Frogs (13-1) to a showdown with reigning national champion Georgia (14-0) in the title game Monday night in Inglewood, California. TCU has just more than 10,000 undergraduate students, about one-third the enrollment at Georgia’s main campus in Athens.