Amon G. Carter Stadium, TCU Horned Frogs Football

On the western edge of the TCU campus sits Amon G. Carter Stadium, named for the newspaper publisher and Fort Worth booster who shaped this city's personality through most of the twentieth century. Carter was famously partisan, he reportedly carried two lunch pails when he traveled to Dallas, one of Fort Worth food and one to throw away rather than eat anything from the rival city. His stadium hosted its first game on October eleventh, nineteen thirty, when TCU defeated Arkansas.

The team that plays here carries one of the more distinctive names in American sports: the Horned Frogs. They play in the Big Twelve Conference, and their history includes a golden era in the nineteen thirties that most football fans today don't know about.

Coach Dutch Meyer built two national championship teams in that decade. The nineteen thirty-five team was led by Sammy Baugh, a lanky Texan from Sweetwater who threw the ball with a precision no one had seen before. The NFL was a run-first league, and Baugh, after joining the Washington Redskins, arguably did more than any single player to transform professional football into a passing game. He later returned to Texas and lived into his nineties on a West Texas ranch.

Three years later, in nineteen thirty-eight, Davey O'Brien quarterbacked TCU to an eleven-and-zero season and the national championship, winning the Heisman Trophy and the Maxwell Award. O'Brien had idolized Baugh so much during their overlapping years together that Baugh eventually named one of his sons Davey O'Brien Baugh. The annual Davey O'Brien Award, given to the nation's top college quarterback, is named for him.

The stadium itself has grown far beyond its original twenty-two-thousand-seat footprint. Two major expansions in the twenty-tens brought the capacity to nearly forty-eight thousand. Locals still call it The Carter, a name that carries the whole history of a city that has always bet on itself.