Campus Insiders: Jamie Dixon Hire Is TCU AD Chris Del Conte’s Latest Savvy Move
By Jonathan Bass
After 13 seasons as head coach of the Pittsburgh Panthers, Jamie Dixon is headed home. On Monday afternoon news broke that Dixon would become the new head basketball coach for Texas Christian University, his alma mater.
While the reveal caught many off guard, anyone who has followed TCU athletics for the past half decade should hardly be surprised. Landing Dixon is the latest savvy maneuver by Horned Frogs athletic director Chris Del Conte.
Del Conte, the 2014-15 NACDA Athletic Director of the Year, has been nothing short of aggressive while positioning his program to become one of the top in the nation. Consider that when he was hired in 2009, TCU was a Mountain West school with an overachieving football program and an underrated coach in Gary Patterson. At the time, the football program was considered a BCS buster and Patterson a flight risk for a larger, more heralded institution with deeper pockets.
Since that time, Del Conte has ushered TCU from the Mountain West to the greener (see: more lucrative) pastures of the Big 12, kept Patterson happy (see: paid handsomely) and thus changed the perception of his program from flash in the pan to perennial title threat. Depending on your feelings regarding Baylor, TCU is unquestionably one of the top two football programs in the nation’s richest pigskin state, Texas. This notion is something that, 10 years ago, would have been unfathomable. …
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