Looking to turn chips into a ‘chip, TCU could alter sport with national championship game victory

LOS ANGELES — Johnny Hodges loves his chips.

“We’re a team full of chips,” the TCU linebacker said.

In Hodges shorthand, that translates to chips on shoulders. A cliché, sure, but an entree into the heart of the No. 3 Horned Frogs. They weren’t meant to be here in the College Football Playoff National Championship.

In fact, the last team in a similar position was BYU in 1984. Those Cougars are the most recent national champions coming from outside the current Power Five.

TCU as a member of the Big 12 is clearly a Power Five team these days, but it’s been a league-hopper over the last quarter century. When its ancestral Southwestern Conference broke up, TCU was passed over for Big 12 membership. From there followed a purgatory of stops in the WAC, Conference USA and Mountain West.

The desperate, little purple engine that could finally achieved its power conference brass ring when the Big 12 opened its doors to TCU in 2012.

There’s a reason why No. 1 Georgia is favored by almost two touchdowns, the largest line in CFP National Championship history. TCU is a long shot. If the Frogs win, they would defeat perhaps the best program in the sport. If the Bulldogs don’t already hold that mantle, Monday night could go a long way to building that narrative.

TCU is just trying to hang on, if you believe recruiting rankings. The Frogs have 17 blue-chip recruits on their roster, four of whom are transfers. The Dawgs have four times as many.

“You can’t overstate what they’ve done,” said former Texas A&M coach R.C. Slocum, a College Football Hall of Fame member, of TCU. “They just stay after you. They’re not an ebb and flow type of team. They just stay the same all the time whether it’s going well or not. It’s hard to beat a team that won’t be beat.”

That explains the Frogs’ late-game comebacks. That explains TCU hanging 55 on Oklahoma. That explains running for 263 yards against a shocked Michigan. That explains why the TCU impact can’t be ignored.

Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark was skipping around Saturday at the CFP National Championship media day like his conference had already won. Yormark has already stated his intent of expanding the Big 12 out to the Pacific Time Zone. With USC and UCLA leaving for the Big Ten, TCU and Big 12 entered the L.A. market this week.

Sort of.

There is a niche community about 27 miles North of SoFi Stadium, the site of Monday’s game, called…