TCU coach Gary Patterson doesn't want score to change story

AUSTIN, Texas — Satisfied by a job well done, if still perspiring from effort, TCU coach Gary Patterson plans to spend the next few days watching film on Iowa State, his team's final opponent in the regular season, while keeping a close eye on the scoreboard.

"We get a chance to watch this weekend and see if anybody gets a chink in their armor," he told USA TODAY Sports from the visitor's locker room at Texas, where the No. 5 Horned Frogs continued their push for the College Football Playoff with a 48-10 win against the Longhorns.

When it comes to the Playoff, Patterson will concede to the importance of style points, if begrudgingly, and at least acknowledge — with a frown, if not an upturned nose — the existence of game control, a phrase coined by the selection committee to describe the overall effectiveness of a team's individual victory.

Other members of the program were more direct: "Obviously, I'd be lying if we weren't aware of style points and all that," wide receiver Josh Doctson said.

Each Playoff must-have was evident on Thursday night. TCU won with style, tossing aside the Longhorns despite the largely mediocre play of its offense, which gained just 368 yards and committed two turnovers; and was in control of the final outcome from start to finish, doing to Texas what no team had done since the start of Big 12 Conference play.

There are messages for the committee to take from the win, Patterson said, beginning with this: "Everybody" — three-quarters of the country, he estimated — "was saying coming in that (Texas) might beat us."

You can't have it both ways, essentially.

"You know, you've got to keep with the same story, you can't say now that they are not any good," Patterson said. "You can't be like, 'Now Texas is not any good.' They are a really good football team, they are really good on defense, and they didn't have (wide receiver) Jaxon Shipley. If you look at how everything went down, we got some takeaways, did some things we needed to."

The victory also serves as a key add-on to the battle between Baylor and TCU, which stand seventh and fifth, respectively, in this week's Playoff selection committee rankings. Baylor also won in Austin, topping the Longhorns 28-7, but that performance seems diminished in the comparison to the Horned Frogs' 38-point win.

Yet TCU continues to battle the Bears' trump card, the head-to-head tiebreaker earned in a 61-58 victory on Oct. 11, and the perception that might play within the committee as it weighs the accomplishments of one Big 12 contender against another.

That was no normal loss, Patterson said: TCU led by three scores in the fourth quarter before falling apart, allowing Baylor to scratch and claw its way to a three-point win.

"Here's the problem I have with everybody, with the Baylor game," Patterson said. "We were up 21 (points). It wasn't like we came back and got beat by three. We ran out of gas on defense and it still really came down to two pass interference penalties: one that didn't get called and one that did."

If TCU had made one play down the stretch, "we wouldn't even be having this conversation."

Besides, Patterson added, it's about the entire body of work, not a single game; when viewed as a whole, TCU's résumé speaks for itself. If the committee does want to eyeball a single game, consider how each team fared against West Virginia: TCU won by a point in Morgantown on Nov. 1, two weeks after the Mountaineers handed Baylor a 41-27 defeat.

"That's why I'm telling you that head-to-head doesn't make a difference," he said. "To me, it doesn't have anything to do with it at all."

All that's left is one game: TCU has nearly stated its entire case — adding an important footnote to the Baylor loss — and can only wait for the selection committee's final verdict.

"We're trying to get to 11 (wins), we're trying to get to be co-champions," said Patterson, "and we're going let the committee decide how they want to decide."