TCU Swole Frogs

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Happy Monday, folks.

I hope that you all enjoyed your extended time with family and friends over the last couple of weeks. More pressing, I hope that you managed to survive an entire weekend(!) without college football. Luckily, there is a game tonight, though if you thought this break was bad, you might not want to check when the next game is after today...

You might notice a couple of style changes to the newsletter. First, we have a shiny new thumbnail to glue onto every email and website to let you know exactly who is adding that extra unread email notification to your Mail app. Next, the old line breaks between content sections were nice, but we think the new hashmarks between them are even nicer. Disagree? Shoot us an email.

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I plan to go deeper into this later this week (spoiler: you'll be getting the normal Friday edition in addition to today's to get back on schedule after missing last week), but just in case something happens between now and then, the B1G is potentially losing two of its most prominent leaders.

Starting at the very, very top, conference commissioner Kevin Warren, the man responsible for poaching USC and UCLA from the Pac-12, has interviewed with the Chicago Bears about taking over their open CEO and President position. With a deep background in the professional ranks and living less than an hour from the Bears' Soldier Field, many expect him to take the gig if offered. Thanks, LinkedIn Jobs!

Michigan Head Coach Jim Harbaugh has also interviewed with multiple NFL teams about moving to the big leagues after dominating in the Big House. If this sounds like déjà vu, it's because the exact same thing happened last year when Harbaugh was about as lowkey as the Vegas Strip when he interviewed with the Vikings. He wasn't offered the gig, so he had to settle for the devastating consolation that was $6.4 million and another field trip to the Playoffs.

Less than a week after the Wolverines' loss to TCU in the semis, it was reported that Harbaugh interviewed with the Broncos, Colts, and Panthers. Most believe that if offered any of them (though he has already been eliminated from the Carolina job search), he would take it. At some point, flirting with leaving every year has to be a turnoff for some of the recruits he's trying to convince to come play for him for 3-4 years...

There were numerous updates from the latest meeting of the NCAA transformation committee, a group tasked with moving collegiate athletics forward. One idea from this meeting in particular, expanding postseason access to at least 25% of teams in any sport with at least 200 teams, caused a couple of whistles from the back of the board room.

In English, this means expanding the playoffs for most major sports. It would not apply to football, though CFB has decided to go and expand the Playoffs on its own and has a massive postseason bowl system as is. The most prominent affected tournament would be March Madness which, if following the recommendation of the committee, would expand from its current 68 to 90 teams...

This isn't official, though many leaders in most sports such as conference commissioners are likely to support its codification. Each individual league will get to vote on whether to implement the committee's suggestions.

The rationale behind the recommendation is to provide more student athletes with the opportunity to experience the joy that is the postseason, but in reality, this would only further water down an already diluted sport. In CBB, no team outside of the top 40 has ever won it all, and 92% of March Madness winners have been top 16 teams entering the tournament. Don't devalue the accomplishment that is just making it to the Big Dance by allowing teams that couldn't even win half of their games to get crushed.

It was also announced that the NCAA was establishing a Board of Governors to maneuver antitrust and employment status conversations with Congress. This move implies that the NCAA is planning to let Congress shape the framework for navigating these decisions in the future rather than league officials themselves.

It also shows that the league is not planning on voluntarily complying with antitrust laws, instead hoping to beg the government to provide the NCAA with an exemption. Just last month, the two US Senators who have been working most closely on NIL-related matters, Tommy Tuberville and Joe Manchin, indicated that they don't anticipate this exemption being offered.

Unclear whether the NCAA has asked really, really nicely.

Finally, the media might finally get a chance to watch college football practices. The NCAA has moved towards removing the cap on the number of on-field coaches teams are allowed to have in practice. This might seem uncorrelated with media presence as most attribute coaches' Fort Knox-level security to safeguarding their playsheets, the truth of the matter is that this arbitrary coach limit is largely to blame.

Currently, only 10 assistant coaches are allowed to be hands-on with players in practice. If you look on the sideline during games, you might notice that there seem to be just as many assistant coaches as there are players. Technically, most of these players are "off-field analysts" who help with strategy and film but aren't actually allowed to give instruction.

This might shock you, but not all college football programs follow the rules, and when the media is ushered out and closed practices begin, this army of assistants comes out to play, err, coach.

No longer having to hide their rule breaking would likely lead to coaches providing more media access like is seen in the NFL. It also means that programs will be able to hire more coaches, some for specific tasks like recruiting. This might lighten the load being forced upon many coaches and address a growing though rarely discussed work management issue in college coaching today.

If you like the business of college football, I'm going to go out on a limb here and conjecture that you like business, too. Think of each company as its own little college football program, and The Startup Breakdown tells you about the ventures on their way to becoming the next Georgia every. single. week. Hit the button and subscribe!

TCU has been the best story in college football this year.

A year removed from missing out on a bowl game with a 5-7 record and firing coach Gary Patterson, the legend who had quite literally built the program from the ground up and navigated the team's transition from the Mountain West to the Big 12, the Horned Frogs find themselves playing in the National Championship after knocking off the heavily favored Michigan Wolverines.

They have a first year head coach in Sonny Dykes, only a couple surefire NFL draft picks, and their quarterback even nearly had to retire last season after discovering a surgery-requiring heart condition and entered this season as the backup before providing one of the gutsiest seasons in history en route to becoming the Heisman runnerup.

What's not to love?

More importantly (at least for opponents looking to channel their own lightning-in-a-bottle seasons), what lessons can be learned from this wild run?

One factor might be that these Froggies are swole.

Strength and conditioning goes beyond how many players get put on Bruce Feldman's "Freaks List" each year. It's also directly related to a team's struggles with the injury bug and recovery times, and how fresh a team is when the game wears on into the second half.

While TCU's S&C coach Kaz Kazadi did help to forge a few of these athletic phenomenons, it's the cumulative lack of injuries and four quarter (and sometimes overtime) toughness that makes Kazadi look like some sort of whey-fueled genius.

Despite losing their starting quarterback Chandler Morris in the first game of the year, the Frogs had ridiculously good luck with team health. On offense, apart from Morris, only one other startup missed time with injuries, and it was a player who missed a single game. On defense, only 7 combined starts were missed because of injury. Someone is doing something right in the weight room to produce this sort of prevention.

Another sign of a good training program is when a team consistently takes over in the second half when their opponent gets tired. TCU was arguably the nation's best second half team with an astounding seven second half comebacks and the nation's third best second half offense.

TCU is also leading the way when it comes to innovative sports and health tech.

Probably after reading 1984, Kazadi equipped each player with a GPS device which tracks their movement, speed, number of steps, and sleep. This information is used by the training staff to create personalized training and recovery programs for each athlete.

For example, star linebacker Johnny Hodges suffered a hamstring injury during the regular season finale. Hoping to get him back in time for the Big 12 Championship, Kazadi set a hard cap on the number of steps the recovering player was allowed to take each day, and when he appeared destined to hit this max, the coach texted his player to demand that he stop walking for the day.

While the cost of this tech expenditure is unclear because the brand used isn't public knowledge, a quick Google search revealed that this likely cost the program ~$150/player for approximately 150 total players. That's nearly $25K in total, in addition to the >$120K in salary for Kazadi, four other salaried football-specific S&C coaches, a new $40M training facility, $4M on nutrition, and various other equipment and resource expenses.

It's likely that much of this staff is going to be getting raises, either from TCU or from other schools hoping to promote them to bring some of their learned lessons to spark other programs into similar strong seasons. Kazadi should absolutely receive a raise as his current salary, while high, is far from what is being paid out to some of the higher earning experts in the profession such as Oklahoma State's Rob Glass' $1M annual pay.

The Horned Frogs shelled out to ensure that their players were prepared to fight for 4 quarters for 15 games this year. This investment was worth it as they have a chance to make history tonight, and based on the buzz around the program and the number of high profile high school recruits and transfers now choosing to call the Cowboy Capital home, the investment will only continue to offer high returns for years to come.

As mentioned, we have just one game left... 😪 Tonight at 7:30 ET, the defending champion Georgia Bulldogs take on the people's champion TCU Horned Frogs in Inglewood, CA.

Unfortunately, with a betting line that opened heavily in favor of the Dawgs (-13.5), it seems most expect the only drama surrounding this one to be over the fact that city officials banned tailgating at the venue. And Cali folks wonder why the rest of college football doesn't take them seriously.

Regardless, I'll be rooting for the Frogs. I love a Cinderella story. And you can never underestimate the power of... #Hypnotoad

Cheers to another day,

Trey