How TCU, Texas A&M coach Dennis Franchione foreshadowed future of college football
· Yahoo Sports
More than once in a prolific college football coaching career, Dennis Franchione proved to be a man ahead of his time.
He won at TCU before the Horned Frogs joined a major conference. He won at Alabama before the Crimson Tide regained national championship eligibility. And at Texas A&M?
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He recognized the upside of bypassing the traditional media middlemen, long before it became cool.
Franchione, who also served two stints as head coach at (Southwest) Texas State on his way to a 213-135-2 career record, died Tuesday at age 75, family members announced. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which confirmed the news, reported Franchione had three bouts with cancer over the past decade.
A Kansas native who got his start in football as a high school coach fresh out of Pittsburg State in 1973, Franchione went on to a four-decade career that foreshadowed how the sport would evolve well into the 21stcentury.
He made a name for himself as an offensive innovator, even way back when his offenses were breaking yardage records with the triple-option. He climbed up the college coaching ladder by hopping from one job to the next, never staying any place longer than the six years he spent in New Mexico, because that's how the modern version of the business worked.
And looking back on Franchione's ascent now, in an era when even United States senators are lamenting the so-called trend of coaches pursuing other gigs before their team's seasons are over? It's amusing that anyone thinks this is new.
Around the turn of the millennium, Franchione did it twice in two years. At the time, he took a lot of grief for leaving the Horned Frogs before their 2000 bowl game, and for the report (later proven correct) that he would be the Aggies' next coach before the Crimson Tide's season finale against Auburn in 2002.
But these days, the only thing that seems unusual about any of that is the idea of someone thinking the A&M job was better than Alabama's.
That decision didn't quite work out for Franchione, obviously, but there were mitigating factors. For one, Alabama was under NCAA probation at the time, which meant that even after leading the Tide to 10 victories and the best record in the SEC West, there was no chance of playing for a championship the next season. Franchione also had the misfortune of arriving at A&M just as Mack Brown was putting together the best decade-long run at Texas since the 1960s.
ORG XMIT: TCU's #85 Kevin Brown a wide receiver, gets a word from their head coach Dennis Franchione during their practice. Photographer: Milton Hinnant Credit: 123290 Date: 19981207 (Milton Hinnant/123290)There was, however, one part of his Aggies tenure in which Franchione was way, way ahead of the curve. You know how, in the age of social media, every team likes to control its own narrative? To tell its own story? To break its own news? To connect with fans directly, instead of doing it through mainstream TV outlets or the newspaper?
Well, years before Facebook or Tik Tok, Franchione got a jump on all of that. He predicted, accurately, that fans craved direct access to information they couldn't get from reporters. And he knew that kind of information had value.
The problem, of course, was that in 2007 he shared a little too much of that information. In a scheme that somehow seems almost as audacious now as it did then, Franchione used what was known as the "VIP Connection" newsletter to email details about his program - including non-public injury updates and candid player evaluations - to boosters who paid $1,200 per year for the access.
When Express-News beat reporter Brent Zwerneman broke the story that fall, it set off a firestorm of criticism, along with questions about whether the newsletter broke any health privacy laws. Then there was the obvious concern about whether the information could be used by sports bettors.
At the time, Franchione explained that recipients of the newsletter were carefully vetted, and were instructed not to share any of the contents of the newsletter.
"We asked them to sign something," Franchione told the Express-News. "And for them not to do that. Most of these people are tremendously loyal Aggies."
In 2026, that sounds downright quaint. In Franchione's defense, he didn't yet see a time when fans could place bets from their phones in the grandstands, and when every commercial break would feature ads for how to place six-game parlays.
Franchione stepped down at the end of that season, but it wasn't because of the newsletter. Through five seasons in College Station, he'd won 32 games and lost 28. The Aggies thought they could do much better, and that someone else could lead them to glory.
Almost two decades later, they're still trying to prove themselves right about that.
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