We like our sports here \u2014 or at least I do \u2014 to reflect life itself. That is, messy, often humbling, and requiring\u00a0hours of thankless work, not to mention the virtue of patience. And more often than not it’s decided by who keeps going despite all the setbacks.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s imperfect, like TCU senior quarterback Ken Seals was on Tuesday night in a 30-27 overtime victory against Southern California in the Valero Alamo Bowl in San Antonio.<\/p>\n
That makes it just perfect.<\/p>\n
Seals\u2019 Cinderella story ended with the slipper fitting perfectly. Playing in place of transfer-portal-bound Josh Hoover, Seals, who has played very little as a backup the past two years,\u00a0led the Frogs back from 10-points down in the last 9\u00bd minutes in the fourth quarter.<\/p>\n
His 35-yard touchdown pass to Jeremy Payne, who willed his way to daylight and the winning score in overtime, will be a memory that outlives the box score.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m not processing it. It\u2019s like a movie,\u201d said Seals in the aftermath of his final college football game. \u201cThis has just been an unbelievable experience. To finish it in this fashion is more than any guy could dream.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mentality was just sell out, it\u2019s your last one, man.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was, quite frankly, a thrilling way to end a nine-win season and well worth staying up past my bedtime.<\/p>\n
Seals was selected the game\u2019s offensive MVP. His stat line: 29-of-40 for 258 yards with a touchdown passing and another running.<\/p>\n
However history and the rest judge TCU\u2019s football team in 2025, these Horned Frogs did college football a favor Tuesday night in offering a blunt rebuttal to bowl cynicism.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnybody that says bowls don’t matter didn’t watch this game tonight, because bowls matter,\u201d TCU head coach Sonny Dykes.<\/p>\n
TCU appeared to go to San Antonio to do more than merely pay homage to Travis, Bowie, Crockett, and the boys while scarfing down a plate of enchiladas at Mi Tierra.<\/p>\n
There was unfinished business to attend to \u2014 both as a team and as a representative of the Big 12 \u2014 and an opportunity to toss sand in the gears of media pundits who know only what box scores and analytics sheets tell them about the league.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had 13 bowl practices, I believe, and never one time did anybody dog it,\u201d said Dykes. \u201cWe had some adversity. Your starting quarterback says he’s not going to play in a game. That’s adversity. Everybody stepped right up.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody said, \u2018OK, we got the guy in the building that can do this in Ken, and you have to believe it. The only way you can go out and do what he did today is you have to prepare yourself every single day for two years, and you have to be incredibly unselfish in order to do that, and he did it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seals, a six-year, COVID-season senior who played high school football at Azle and Weatherford, was 2-20 in two-plus seasons as the starter at Vanderbilt. He admittedly came out \u201crusty\u201d on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot going to lie, I kind of forgot how to run a football,\u201d Seals said. \u201cI think I got hit standing up straight and just dropped the football the start of the second half.\u201d<\/p>\n
The offense put up a goose egg in the third quarter. We\u2019re not gonna lie \u2014 things looked bleak.<\/p>\n
But the Frogs chose to continue to keep going. Payne capped an 11-play drive, 75-yard drive with a 5-yard touchdown run with 5:13 left. The Frogs defense held to give the offense another chance, 3 points down with 2:44 left. Seals directed a 13-play, 59-yard drive to set up Kyle Lemmermann\u2019s 27-yard field goal with 2 seconds left to force overtime.<\/p>\n
Payne is simply a baller.<\/p>\n
In overtime, he took Seals\u2019 short pass in the left flat on third-and-20. The objective was field-goal range for an attempt to tie the game and live another day.\u00a0Payne, though, didn’t get that memo, managing to\u00a0maneuver around four defenders, the last missing a tackle, staying inbounds, and then darting down the sideline for the 35-yard game-winning score.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fire up the partaay bus.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not surprised that he just went out there and made a bunch of dudes miss. He was doing it all night,\u201d said TCU linebacker Kaleb Elarms-Orr, the game\u2019s defensive MVP. \u201cShoot, he be shaking me at practice sometimes, too. Once he made that first dude miss, I knew he was gone.\u201d<\/p>\n
TCU, like USC, finished 2025 at 9-4. A second consecutive nine-win season wasn\u2019t good enough for many fans, who measure everything against impossible standards, particularly the one set in the 13-1 season of 2022.<\/p>\n
The past can both inspire and suffocate.<\/p>\n
The Frogs, though, ended this season the right way \u2014 with a victory, a prince charming, and momentum. TCU opens next season in Ireland with a rematch against Bill Belichick and his girlfriend.<\/p>\n
The bowl season still means something.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is important for this university and most importantly these young men, and it matters,\u201d Dykes said. \u201cThey treated it that way, and that’s why they came out on the winning edge.<\/p>\n
\u201cLook, I want to be in the playoff every year. I know our players want to be in the playoff every year. I know our fans want to be. We’re going to work our tails off to get there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We like our sports here \u2014 or at least I do \u2014 to reflect life itself. That is,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106493,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[40106,261,116,118,117,2862,82,9425,853,92,48083],"class_list":["post-106492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-worth","tag-alamo-bowl","tag-college-football","tag-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth-headlines","tag-fort-worth-news","tag-john-henry","tag-san-antonio","tag-sonny-dykes","tag-tcu","tag-top-story","tag-university-of-southern-california"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}