TCU is Bowling: Frogs to face Cal in Cheez-It Bowl

After a challenging season that ended with TCU Football winning three of their final four games to get to six wins, the Frogs will be playing a postseason game for the 16th time in Gary Patterson’s 18 years in Fort Worth.

Sunday’s announcement sent the Frogs to Phoenix to play the Cal Bears out of the Pac-12, an intriguing matchup that should be a fun ball game, and the second consecutive year that TCU will face off with a Bay Area foe. It will be the first career meeting between the two programs, but Justin Wilcox was on staff with Boise State back when that rivalry was heated.

Most TCU fans were disappointed or surprised by the matchup, but Cal is a talented team with some nice wins on their resume. This game is held in a baseball stadium, the home of the Diamondbacks, which is always interesting as far as set-up goes.

Around the Big 12, seven teams earned bowl bids, led by Oklahoma, who will be a part of the College Football Playoff for the second straight year, having secured their spot by defeating Texas in the Big 12 Championship game Saturday afternoon. Texas, their opponent in the conference finale, will face #5 Georgia in the Sugar Bowl, earning the league’s auto-bid in the NY6.

The Alamo Bowl has the pick of the remaining teams, and missed an opportunity to pit Dana Holgorsen against Mike Leach in an epic matchup of possibly insane people that happen to lead football programs, electing instead to send an up-and-coming Iowa State squad to San Antonio to face off with the Washington State Cougars. That sent the Mountaineers to Orlando yet again, where they will play Syracuse is what is a sneaky fun bowl game. In an affront to basic decency and head-to-head mattering, the Texas Bowl in Houston picked Baylor over TCU, apparently suffering from some of the same memory issues that plague Urban Meyer at the most inopportune times. This one really stings, as Frog fans have proven that they travel well to bowl games in Texas, and would have likely done so once again. That also means that the Liberty Bowl elected to chose Oklahoma State to face Mizzou, as opposed to returning the Frogs to Memphis, where they played Georgia two seasons prior.

We will have much more information on the game and the matchup in the coming weeks.