TCU took a country-style whooping from defending national champion Georgia in the national championship game on Monday night. The Oklahoma football community knows how that feels.
The stunning margin of defeat handed to the No. 3 Horned Frogs was unprecedented for a game that is supposed to feature the top two teams in college football, but a feeling with which Sooner Nation regrettably has some experience.
It’s ironic that on a stormy night in Southern California there was also a hurricane-like storm named Georgia bearing down inside So-Fi Stadium, and TCU had the unfortunate wrong-place, wrong-time presence of getting caught up in it.
His eyes glazed over, TCU head coach told reporters after the game, “I don’t know what happened tonight. We ran into a real good team.”
“We all know what happened,” wrote Berry Tramel, sports columnist for The Oklahoman. “The Frogs ran into Georgia (and the SEC).”
Something Oklahoma and Texas will get the pleasure of experiencing when they move shortly to the SEC.
Tramel went on to add in the same article:
"“These days for Big 12 schools, winning a national championship is like a camel going through the eye of a needle.”"
Five times a Big 12 team has made it to the College Football Playoff in the now nine seasons that format has been in existence. Four of those appearances were by Oklahoma, but TCU is the only Big 12 team to make it past the semifinal round.
It is true that TCU can boast being the only Big 12 team to advance to and play for the national championship in the playoff era, and the Horned Frogs can now lay claim to suffering the worst defeat in CFP history after losing by a margin of 58 points, 65-7, to top-ranked and undefeated Georgia.
The Sooners did have an embarrassing 35-point loss to eventual national champion LSU and Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow in the 2019 CFP semifinal round, but their three other playoff losses were by 20 points (to Clemson in 2015), seven points (in double overtime to Georgia in 2017) and by 11 (to Alabama in 2018).
TCU’s margin of defeat to Georgia (plus five points) was almost equal to all of Oklahoma’s playoff losses combined. That’s how historically horrific and one-sided it was.
Oklahoma also played in four national championship games in the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) era (1998 to 2013). The Sooners won one of those games (13-2 over Florida State in 2001) but lost in the three other BCS National Championship appearances. The worst of those was a 55-19 hammering by No. 1 USC in 2005. The other two defeats were to LSU by seven (21-14) in 2004 and to Tim Tebow and Florida by ten (24-14) in 2009.
Again, you can combine the Sooners’ three BCS Championship defeats, which add up to a total losing margin of 53 points, and it would not equal the single-game embarrassment that a group of hungry, angry and determined — some would say destined — Georgia Bulldogs handed down to overmatched and outmanned TCU on Monday night in what will be the final year of the four-team College Football Playoff. Next season, of course, the format expands to 12 teams.
So, thank you TCU, for relieving Oklahoma of the dubious honor of having suffered the worst loss of any team in both the BCS and CFP eras.