COLLEGE FOOTBALL LOOK AHEAD

Bears ready for high-stakes brawl with TCU

The Sports Xchange

October 07, 2014 at 12:38 pm.

Gary Patterson and his TCU team won't be a pushover for Baylor. (Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports)

WACO, Texas — Just over 10 months have passed since TCU coach Gary Patterson took extreme umbrage with Baylor coach Art Briles’ handling of his team during the Bears’ 41-38 victory at the Horned Frogs in 2013.

Patterson was angry about a hit delivered by safety Ahmad Dixon, Baylor’s response to Dixon and Briles’ response to the TCU sideline. So Patterson essentially challenged Briles to a fist fight if Briles wanted to travel back to Fort Worth for it.

“He knows where I live,” Patterson said in the postgame press conference. “Gary Patterson lives in Fort Worth, if he’s got a problem with me.”

But in his weekly press conference, Briles steered miles clear of adding fuel to the fire burning between him and Patterson. Briles said Patterson has done an excellent job with the Horned Frogs and later, when pressed, said he doesn’t have conflict with Patterson, though he added that he doesn’t socialize with Patterson or any other coaches.

Oh well, a little back-and-forth between the Baylor and TCU coaches would have been a tantalizing appetizer for Saturday’s game, but the 5th-ranked Bears against the 9th-ranked Horned Frogs still looks pretty good.

Baylor (5-0) and TCU (4-0) represent the Big 12’s two best bets, at least at this early stage, to make the College Football Playoff. Of course, one of them will take a hit in the pursuit this week.

Nonetheless, the Bears and Horned Frogs pulled off an unlikely feat as Baylor went to Texas and defeated the Longhorns, while TCU won a home game against Oklahoma last week. Actually, the wins themselves aren’t so unlikely, but more so the fact that Baylor-TCU is a more enticing game this week than the annual Texas-Oklahoma Red River skirmish.

Baylor fans would probably like to see quarterback Bryce Petty rebound from a 7-for-22, 111-yard performance against Texas. But Briles saw the big picture — that Petty led the Bears to a win in Austin.

“We understand as an offensive football team that you can’t play at a certain level all the time,” Briles said. “So you play as well as you can as long as you can. When things aren’t as smooth as they were previously, you find a way to win and that’s what we did Saturday. Bryce did a nice job of engineering drives when we needed them to win the football game.”

It would seem, though, that Petty is going to have to do a lot more to win the football game this week against TCU.

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