Dennis Franchione, former TCU, Alabama and Texas A&M coach, dies at 75

Dennis Franchione, who helped revive TCU football before coaching Alabama and Texas A&M, has died at 75. ESPN reported Tuesday that his family confirmed his death to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Franchione’s career covered 40 years and several levels of college football. ESPN lists his overall head coaching record as 213–135–2 across 30 seasons, including his years at Southwestern College and Pittsburg State. His major-college stops also included New Mexico and two separate periods at Texas State.

His three seasons in Fort Worth changed TCU’s trajectory. He arrived in 1998 after the Horned Frogs had gone 1–10, then led them to a 7–5 season and a Sun Bowl victory over USC. TCU followed with another bowl win and eventually returned to the final national rankings in 2000.

The school’s own archive captures how much changed early in that tenure. Its September 2000 game notes describe the 1999 Western Athletic Conference championship and victories over USC and East Carolina in successive bowls. TCU had won only 11 games in the three seasons before Franchione arrived.

LaDainian Tomlinson developed into a national star during that run. The Horned Frogs went 25–10 in Franchione’s three seasons, according to Yahoo Sports. When he left for Alabama after the 2000 regular season, defensive coordinator Gary Patterson was promoted and went on to lead TCU for more than two decades.

Franchione’s Alabama teams went 17–8 over two seasons. The 2002 team finished 10–3 while the program was ineligible for the postseason because of NCAA penalties arising from earlier violations. He then left for Texas A&M, where the Aggies went 32–28 during five seasons.

He returned to Texas State in 2011 as the program moved toward college football’s top division and retired after the 2015 season. That final stop followed an earlier tenure there when it was known as Southwest Texas State.

For TCU, Franchione’s lasting contribution was the recovery that preceded Patterson’s long tenure: winning seasons, conference success and bowl victories that restored national attention to a program emerging from a difficult decade.