Horned Frogs

Sammy Baugh arrived at TCU as an infielder who happened to throw a football better than anyone had seen in Texas, and by 1935 he had turned a jump-pass into the weapon that carried the Horned Frogs to a national title. Three years later Davey O'Brien did it again, taking the 1938 team to a second championship and going on to win the Heisman Trophy — the award for the nation's best college player now carries his name. Between them, those two seasons remain the only national championships TCU claims, though the program has never stopped adding to the record since: eighteen conference titles spread across six different leagues, from the Texas Intercollegiate Athletic Association in 1920 through the Southwest Conference, the Western Athletic Conference, Conference USA, the Mountain West and, in 2014, the Big 12.

The nickname long predates any of that. It comes from the Texas horned frog, the small spiked lizard that is the state's official amphibian, and it gave the university's teams their identity and their purple-and-white colours decades before Baugh ever threw a pass. The lineage since has run from Baugh and O'Brien to LaDainian Tomlinson, who left Fort Worth to become an NFL MVP and a Pro Football Hall of Famer, and more recently to Max Duggan, who led the team to the College Football Playoff and a Heisman finalist finish. Six TCU players have reached the Hall of Fame, and six have finished as Heisman finalists.

None of that history carries the edge of the game against Baylor, played since long before either school had won anything national and now known as the Bluebonnet Battle — 121 meetings and counting. TCU plays it, like every home date, at Amon G. Carter Stadium on the university campus in Fort Worth, where a crowd of 53,294 once outgrew the stadium's own seats.