TCU lost this game on a kick that didn't even have to be caught cleanly to be survived. Up 28-20 with just over six minutes left, the Horned Frogs needed to do the dullest thing in football, field a kickoff, and they couldn't do it. That's how you turn a win you're holding into a 29-28 loss on the road.
Arizona, down by two after a 15-yard touchdown pass from Noah Fifita to Quincy Craig with 1:45 left, missed the two-point conversion. The Wildcats still trailed. All TCU had to do was handle the ensuing kickoff. Instead of a desperate full onside, Brent Brennan's staff dribbled a little pooch kick into no-man's land from freshman Ian French. TCU returner Ed Small went up for an over-the-shoulder catch and came down with nothing. Zuri Watson fell on it at the TCU 26. Four plays later, Michael Salgado-Medina drilled a 37-yard field goal. Tyrese Boss picked off the last gasp with 29 seconds to go, and that was the ballgame.
The pooch kick itself was a sharp, aggressive call by a staff with nothing to lose. But a pooch kick only works if the other team flinches. It's designed to put a returner in an awkward spot and dare him to be perfect. TCU had a man standing right there, and he flinched. Give Brennan credit for throwing the dare. The collapse belongs to the team that took it.
Arizona had problems of its own. The Wildcats spent the night playing without four defensive backs, and TCU's receivers feasted, Kari Ashley with 14 catches and Jordan Dwyer with a touchdown among his nine grabs. Jaden Craig ran for two scores and threw for another. Arizona's own quarterback handed TCU a gift earlier, Fifita forcing an ill-advised ball that Hudson Hooper took back 93 yards for a pick-six that flipped the game in the first half. Both sides made game-wrecking mistakes. TCU just made the last one, at the worst possible moment, on the simplest possible play.
Fifita was terrific when it counted: 313 yards, two touchdowns through the air, another on the ground. Giovanni Richardson's 11 catches for 171 yards kept the drives alive. Arizona earned the right to be in position at the end, but that doesn't change the fact that TCU led by eight with the clock bleeding out and lost because a kick bounced off a pair of hands that should have squeezed it.
Sonny Dykes said he was disappointed for his players. He should be. His team dropped to 4-5 with a season slipping sideways, while Arizona moved to 7-2 and extended a home winning streak that's now the longest in Tucson since the mid-90s. The Wildcats will take it and move on to Utah. TCU gets to spend the week explaining how you blow a game you'd already won by not catching a football.
