From beginning to end, this game was dominated by the Horned Frogs 42-3 over the Ole Miss Rebels inside the Georgia Dome for the 2014 Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl. You could say that this was a chance for them to prove everyone wrong for leaving them out of the four-team College Football Playoff.
A consistent voice of taking the high road from the end of the regular season, bowl announcements, and until now has been TCU head coach Gary Patterson. That continued on Wednesday.
“Somebody in this World needs to start taking the high road,” Patterson said. “Whether its football, politics, or anything else you do. This playoff system is not perfect, neither was the BCS, and neither has anything that I have been a part of in 33 years. But the bottom line to it is if we set our mind to what we’re going to do, then we’ve got to be a part of it.”
Patterson has put out the same sentiments all throughout the month of December and says that this game was all about how they could play. He added that the team was excited about playing Ole Miss from the second the bowl assignments were announced.
Domination does not even begin to say how this game was played by the TCU Horned Frogs. They were up 28-0 at the half with quarterback Trevonne Boykin accounting for 136 yards of total offense. He finished with 252 total yards.
Other numbers that made these facts more evident are the Rebels only being held to 129 total yards of offense throughout the entire game. They sacked Ole Miss quarterback Bo Wallace five times in this game. They also forced four turnovers. Three of those takeaways came from interceptions, while another one was from a fumble. One of them was intercepted in the end zone by junior defensive end James McFarland.
If you needed any more evidence to find out whether or not TCU was indeed happy to be in the Chick-Fil-A Bowl, Boykin even added as much. That said, he does say the playoff is still thought about in Fort Worth.
“It would have been a blessing for our team to have been in it, but we’re happy we’re Chick-Fil-A Bowl Champions and we’re going to live with that for the rest of our lives,” Boykin said. “And hopefully next year we can be one of those top four teams.”
More motivation for some of these players, is to prove the Big 12 conference can play with the SEC. Junior wide receiver Josh Doctson liked the idea of showing what they could do against Ole Miss.
“Coming into this game we heard about this being SEC country,” Doctson said. “We really don’t understand what that means, we just came out here to play this game as we can because it’s the next game, especially for the seniors today.”
Doctson finished the game with six catches for 59 yards. He also brought in two touchdowns.
He is one of many players that are going to return next season for a Horned Frog team that will be loaded and possibly primed to make a run at the College Football Playoff.
As for this year’s team, players like wide receiver Kolby Listenbee thought they proved a lot to the country’s college football viewers.
“We showed everybody that we should have been a part of the playoff,” Listenbee said. “We beat an SEC team that everyone was talking about and they’re a great team too.”
Listenbee started the game off with the first touchdown on a reverse wide receiver pass to running back Aaron Green, after the Horned Frogs got the ball on an interception by junior safety Chris Hackett. That was a play that Gary Patterson felt confident calling for the second play of the game. Saying that they’ve practiced that play as a first team offense against the first team defense this season
“It worked just exactly against us the way it worked against them,” Patterson said. “It was a touchdown. So I think they obviously have got to be a little bit lucky because we had a couple other trick plays that didn’t quite work the way we wanted them to. So we’ll take the one that happened, but I think they feel good about it.”
TCU will get most of their starting offensive and defensive players back for the 2015 season. Wednesday afternoon might have been the finale of the 2014 season. However if that is evidence of what this team can do, then we’ll be seeing them play in the College Football Playoff next year.
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