CFP NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP: GEORGIA VS TCU

January 9, 2023

Sonny Dykes

Max Duggan

Dee Winters

SoFi Stadium

TCU Horned Frogs

Postgame Press Conference

Georgia - 65, TCU - 7

THE MODERATOR: We're joined by TCU head coach Sonny Dykes, along with student-athletes Max Duggan and Dee Winters.

COACH DYKES: Well, tough one tonight. I think anybody that saw that could see that we certainly didn't play our best. You've got to give Georgia a ton of credit. They did a tremendous job of getting their team ready to play.

Those guys came out and played exceptionally well. They've got a very good football team. Really talented. And the thing that, again, I was impressed about Georgia coming into the game is they played hard all the time and they played well, and really had a lot of pride in their performance in the way they played, and you could see it today.

They did an excellent job. I thought their quarterback really played an outstanding game. Tight end obviously played an outstanding game as well.

And we just, look, we've got a good football team and it was a tough one tonight.

We'll evaluate what happened. Couldn't be more proud of our football team, though. And especially these two young men that are up here with me right now just for what they've meant to TCU football and just what kind of people they are. I think we're all disappointed that we didn't play better and we didn't coach better and we didn't represent our team better than we did tonight.

But we'll learn from it. And next time we're on a stage like this we'll handle it better.

THE MODERATOR: Questions for the student-athletes.

Q. I know that this isn't the result you wanted today. But when you look back on this season, after being picked seventh in the Big 12 and everybody kind of overlooked you guys, how do you put into words finishing 13-2 with the Fiesta Bowl championship win?

MAX DUGGAN: I think Coach Dykes said it. Tonight did not go the way we wanted it to. Disappointed in that aspect. But tonight isn't going to take away from this season and what we were able to do as a program.

I don't think that's going to define all the good memories and all the success that we had this season to project and put this program in the right direction and moving forward. I think that was the biggest thing of this program's moving in the right way in the right direction. There were so many great memories this year. Obviously we're disappointed tonight, but not going to let this take away from a remarkable season.

DEE WINTERS: I think he pretty much hit the nail on the head. This is something we definitely weren't looking forward to. But looking back, it was a long journey. And I think all the guys kind of appreciate Coach Kaz and Coach Dykes coming in and showing us the ropes of how to be a winner. And we're excited to have them the next couple of years.

COACH DYKES: I'll say this to add to that, too. I think as Max said, a loss like this stings. But we talked about this a little bit in the locker room a second ago, just about how far we've come in a year and what these guys have been able to accomplish really when nobody outside of our locker room expected it or really believed in them.

They always believed in themselves and they always rolled their sleeves up and worked incredibly hard and competed every single second of every day. And you couldn't ask for more than that.

Again, I'm disappointed we didn't make a better show tonight because that's not indicative of who we are. But we'll look back -- it's going to take some time for the sting to go away, I assure you -- but we'll look back on the season and build on it from here.

Q. Were they that much better than you? That outcome we were not expecting at all. Were they that much better than you?

DEE WINTERS: You know, defensive flaws, they didn't really do anything special. We just kind of beat ourselves up. Kind of just executed on our mis-alignments and kept scoring on those.

We just kept beating ourselves up, just overthinking, trying to run too fast to the ball and things of that nature.

MAX DUGGAN: They're a great team. Everybody knows how good they've been this year and prior years, and we knew that. I think tonight was one of those nights where at least offensively we couldn't get anything rolling. They were playing well on defense. We were shooting ourselves in the foot. I was making bad decisions. I wasn't executing well and not putting us in a position to score some points and move the ball.

But they're a great team. Obviously that's not what we thought was going to happen or wanted to happen or what we worked for. But it was just one of those nights where we couldn't really do much on our end.

Q. I know it's hard right now in this moment to kind of grasp it all, but when you look back at this team, what are you going to remember about the character and resiliency you displayed all season long?

MAX DUGGAN: I think that's the best thing about being part of a football team and especially this one. I mean, long pass this time, we'll probably not remember the wins and losses or stuff like that. But we'll remember the men in that locker room, the guys we got to grow up with, that we learned more about.

When stuff got tough and things kind of got hard, you saw what type of men that we've got in our locker room that continue to fight, believe. It's such a fun group to go to work with. It's the little stuff that you'll remember about this season. Probably less about the wins and losses, but what great men we've got.

Q. Max, how much was Georgia's pressure, was that the most pressure you've kind of seen all year in terms of how consistent and quick they were?

MAX DUGGAN: I mean, they were good up front. I don't know. I don't really know compared to stuff coming up in this year or this season. They had some blitzes, some pressures they got through. I held onto the ball a little bit too long, wasn't getting through reads, was kind of causing trouble for the O line myself. It was kind of on me.

But they had some good schemes. Again, going back to the stuff we were doing that we weren't executing well, and they were playing well on their end, and that isn't a great recipe for success.

Q. This hasn't happened to you. How can you describe the feeling, the frustration early in the game when you figured out what you're so good at wasn't there tonight?

DEE WINTERS: You know, it was just something that we really had to finish, like you said, but Coach Kaz did a great job just trying to tell us always have that next-play mentality, to come out and just compete. And you go from there.

MAX DUGGAN: I think when stuff like that happens you've got to go back to your roots, go back to your values, the culture that we set. It was frustrating. Haven't been in a situation like that. But you've got to dig yourself out of a hole. You've got to believe.

I know going forward, this program is going to get on this stage again. And if we're ever in a situation like that, I know we're going to be able to get out of it, have some success. And I'm pretty positive in that.

THE MODERATOR: Questions for Coach.

Q. You said you guys are going to sit down and evaluate what's next. I guess, is there any value you can take from this game kind of showing you and the staff how much further you guys need to go to kind of really become a championship program?

COACH DYKES: Yeah, for sure. You know, that's the good thing about, I think, our program and really our coaching staff, and we'll look in the mirror. It's what I told our players afterwards. We have to look in the mirror.

It all starts with me and works down from there. And the thing that we did, we had a formula that worked where we played pretty well for 14 straight weeks. And we carried the same formula into this game. We didn't do anything different.

There was no preparation that was any different. There was no -- I didn't have any sense that our players were in a different place. Their preparation was good.

There was zero difference between preparation for this game than there was for the Michigan game 10 days ago or nine days ago, whenever that was.

So I think what happens sometimes is you get on a run like we've been on. You play a lot of games like we played this year that are emotional games and games that you put everything you have into it to win it.

You did it nine days ago against a Michigan team where we had to hold on and fight and scratch for every inch against a very good football team and found a way to win. And got out there tonight and Georgia did a great job, got off to a fast start.

We answered. Cut it to 10-7. And then for whatever reason it went downhill from there.

We'll sit down as a staff and begin trying to figure out what happened tomorrow and make sure it doesn't happen again and learn from it.

I think that's the best thing that happens when you face adversity like this, you make mistakes and you learn from them. And you get better as a program. You get better as a coach. You get better as players. And the next time you handle the situation a little bit better.

But our preparation was really good. I thought we had two of the better practices, when we were in full pads, than we had had all year. And to be able to have those -- and it was week 22 for us, I believe -- for the players to practice like they did 22 weeks into the season, it's a real credit to those guys.

And, again, I don't know what happened tonight. We ran into a really good team and we did some very uncharacteristic things and it snowballed on us. And that hasn't happened to us one time this year that we haven't been able to fight our way back and figure out a way to get back in the game or win the game. We weren't able to do it tonight.

So we'll self-evaluate and make corrections and go from there.

Q. You mentioned that this sting is going to last for a while and you'll get back to work evaluating this tomorrow. But when you think about how you carry a thing like this into the future for this program, what's the next month or so look like for you as you put together a plan to do that?

COACH DYKES: Look, our guys have been going, we've been practicing pretty much since the end of July. And we have a bunch of young people that are 18 to 22 years old that have really poured everything they have into it.

They're been home one weekend since the football started to see their family.

So these guys have paid a lot into this run and into having this kind of success. They've given everything they have, made a ton of sacrifices. We start school here pretty quickly.

We've got a good plan on how to give our guys some rest. We have a significant group of newcomers that start school, that actually report tomorrow, believe it or not. Show up on our campus and go through orientation to start moving into the dorms tomorrow.

So no rest for the weary. We'll get back. We'll start helping those players get settled and they'll start school a week from Tuesday and here we go.

So we've got to give these guys a little bit of a break. It will be a little bit of a different schedule maybe than it normally is because of that.

We'll wrap up recruiting. Still have three or four recruits that we're chasing, and hopefully get those guys on board and just continue to build and learn from tonight and, again, make sure it doesn't happen again.

Q. Can you just describe what this entire run has done for our city of Fort Worth and the university in general?

COACH DYKES: It's one of the things that's most disappointing. Look you hate it for your players and your fans that traveled all the way to LA. They really invested in our program. I know flights were expensive. I know tickets were expensive. I know all of it was hard to do. And our fans answered the call every single time we asked them to do something, they've done it.

And we're all very appreciative. We're disappointed for them. We feel like we let them down with our performance tonight.

We certainly wouldn't be where we are without them. And wish we would have represented TCU and the football program better tonight than we did.

But, again, we're proud of what we've done, proud of them, appreciate their support of us. It's been a fun year. It's been a long year. I think all of us probably need to catch our breath tomorrow and get back to the grind stone here pretty quickly.

Q. You used the word "uncharacteristic." What's at the top of the list that was uncharacteristic?

COACH DYKES: It was interesting. You look at early in the game and we really protected the quarterback well when we dropped back to throw. It got worse as the game went along. Our threat of running the football consistently went away.

But we felt pretty good after a series or two that we could drop back and throw the ball and we could create some things offensively. Felt like we could also run the ball.

We just dug such a big hole for ourselves. We never could quite get them stopped defensively. We never could get out of our own way on offense.

First play of the game for us was a false start. We probably have had three false starts all year. You know what I mean? And probably over a thousand plays, maybe had three false starts. First play of the game we have a false start tonight.

Just things like that. That's just not who we are. We're not that kind of football team. If we make those mistakes we're not going to win football games. We're certainly not going to be playing for a national championship making those kind of mistakes.

And I thought we had some busts defensively, some alignment busts, assignment busts. We cut some receivers loose. Again, that's not something we've done.

I think in some ways, our guys, we got in the locker room a little bit before the game. You could sense some tension in the room. And we've got to try to not have that. We haven't had that in the past. We've been pretty loose.

The guys were really excited to play, really fired up to play. I thought we were probably just a little too fired up, maybe a little too emotional. And as a result did some things that we don't normally do. I just don't think we were in the state of mind that we needed to be in.

And we've got to do a better job trying to get our players there. And obviously failed in that regard. And, again, we'll learn from this mistake and hopefully address it and make sure it doesn't happen again.

Q. Did you feel like -- earlier you talked about preparation and how things were working for 14 weeks. Did you feel like -- I'm not sure if you were saying this -- but did you feel like you should have altered from that for this game?

COACH DYKES: I don't know. I think it worked for us in the past. Did you have a second part to that question? If you did I didn't mean to cut you off.

But let me answer this. I felt we had had success. We had played probably close to our capabilities throughout the run that we went on this year. And you know, we didn't want to change that. We felt it kind of got us to this point as a program and we didn't really want to change it and we were comfortable with that preparation style.

Q. Do you feel like this loss taught you anything about what you need to do as a coach to prepare?

COACH DYKES: For sure. Certainly. We'll certainly sit down as a staff and watch the film, talk about, go through every single call we made in the game and say, okay, look, why didn't this work? Where did this go wrong? What could we have done better?

And talk about preparation. Talk to some of our players, get some feedback from those guys about how they felt coming into the game, Did we feel like there was too much of the game plan, not enough in the game plan? Just all those things.

I know leading up to today, I know our guys felt very comfortable about the preparation, felt like it was as good as we had had. As I said, the practices were very good. Felt like the game plan was good coming in, and clearly it wasn't what it needed to be and clearly we didn't execute it the way we wanted to.