By Jamie Plunkett
Frogs Today staff writer
LOS ANGELES — TCU is the underdog heading into Monday night’s national championship game, but the Horned Frogs won’t be wearing glass slippers when they arrive.
Yes, it’s a fun story that the Frogs have made it to the College Football Playoff National Championship, and, yes, it’s an unlikely run under the circumstances.
But to call them a Cinderella is, frankly, demeaning.
TCU fans are used to it, though.
After all, TCU was the Cinderella story the year it posted a 13-0 record and won the Rose Bowl. They were co-Cinderellas with Boise State the year before, too, when both schools were shunted to the side in the Fiesta Bowl where they couldn’t upset anybody.
The Frogs were Cinderellas again as they knocked on the door of the College Football Playoff in 2014.
In fact, in each of TCU’s 10-plus-win seasons since the year 2000 — of which there have been 13, most in the state of Texas — the Frogs have been handed some kind of Cinderella-esque label.
But, in all honestly, the perception of TCU doesn’t match the reality. And after more than a decade of playing the role, it’s time to recast the Frogs as something more fitting: a team that belongs.
They are, as Geoff Mitchell of the FrogCast stated on Twitter last week, who the national media think Texas and Texas A&M are.
