Best of the 2000's Counting Down the Mountain West Top 10 Teams: #5 2005 TCU Horned Frogs

Now, it is time to continue the countdown of the decades best team, and now we move to the number five spot.

#5 TCU Horned Frogs (11-1)

This was the first year that TCU was in the Mountain West and they ran through the league undefeated behind a patented Gary Patterson defense that was top 25 nationally in total defense.  This team surprised all teams in the Mountain West as they were predicted to finish fifth in the league.  This team had one of the biggest upsets of the year when they defeated Oklahoma in Norman.  At the time Oklahoma was ranked seventh in nation and propolled TCU into premature BCS talks as a follow up to what conference mate Utah achieved the previous year.

The only problem was that TCU was way too high and loss the following week to rival SMU.  That was a huge blow to the Horned Frogs because SMU ended up going 5-6 and cost TCU on a BCS game.  Had the rules been what they would be in 2006 which allowed a non-BCS team a bid if they were in the top 12 TCU would have been very close to qualifying for the BCS.

One fact that is interesting about that year is that had TCU beat lowly SMU there would have been nine teams who met their criteria for the four bowl games (the fifth bowl was added the following year).   There were all conference champs, Notre Dame was ranked 8th which gave them an auto bid as would have Ohio State for getting the non-automatic automatic bid for being fourth but not a conference champ.  Then include TCU there would have been an extra team who qualified who did not go bowling, too bad that did not happen then because that could have blown up the BCS.