In the heat of the moment following the loss to Oklahoma Saturday, Gary Patterson lit into the officiating. A couple of days later, the TCU head coach is attempting to cram the toothpaste back into the tube.
Patterson ripped officials for a critical intentional grounding penalty on his quarterback, Kenny Hill, that originally wasn’t called but ultimately flagged after the crew spoke to OU head coach Bob Stoops. The Horned Frogs coach also lamented numerous holds by the Sooners that weren’t called.
“Bottom line to it is, I wasn’t happy with the officiating,” Patterson, who also took a shot at OU quarterback Baker Mayfield, said at the time.
Tuesday, Patterson acknowledged that he regretted saying the things he did following the game. While he stopped short of a full-blown apology, Patterson’s public regrets, the coach stated, were his own and (winkwinknudgenudge) he wasn’t pushed into backing off the criticisms.
From ESPN.com:When it came to officials, Baker, anything, the bottom line to it is you have to be bigger than all of it,” Patterson said. “You have passion. I think in my 19 seasons here I can count on two hands, maybe six times that I’ve said things that usually by the next day I’ve regretted. After that, by the time I got to my radio show [I regretted it]. That’s a good officiating crew. This game goes really fast. It’s hard to be an officiating crew any more.”
...
“I have a high respect for Bob Stoops and the University of Oklahoma, [athletic director] Joe [Castiglione],” Patterson said. “Bob’s a really good friend and I wish them the best. The bottom line is it’s been great football games. So in this day and age right now in our horizon, everybody throws things out, everybody thinks they can say whatever they want to. The biggest thing for me is I don’t want to be part of that. You go down and come back from 20 something points and you have some suspect things going on, but the bottom line is I’ve had some of those things go my way. You stay in this profession long enough you’re going to have some things that are going to be good for you and some things that aren’t.”
Patterson ended by saying, “From a football coach, that’s probably the closest to an apology as you’ll ever get, probably.The loss to the Sooners was the Horned Frogs’ first in Big 12 play.