With TCU's "Friday Night Lights" spring game and dramatic, firework-filled jersey reveal fresh in the past, Gary Patterson was confronted with one more piece of duty as the Horned Frogs head coach.
A fan handed him a baby.
Patterson has no interest in throwing his name into a muddled 2016 presidential race, but parents don't often trust their infants to coaches riding the wake of a 4-8 season.
They might hand one to the guy fresh off a 12-1 season and his first Big 12 title after logging six trophies in three different leagues from 2000 to 2011.
From the outside, TCU looks like a changing program growing into a brand-new stadium and preparing to take up its office residence in a brand-new basketball arena.
Inside, very little has changed, even though TCU has been a program in constant metamorphosis since Patterson took over a decade and a half ago.
Along the way, the program collected plenty of experiences and accolades that prepared it for what may be a defining season in the program's history.
National title talk?
"You guys acted like we just started playing football. It's not our first time being ranked high," Patterson told FOX Sports Southwest. "It's not our first time having NFL guys or dealing with reporters. This is our 18th year here, not the third."
The Frogs will likely open the season in the top five, but it was No. 6 to begin 2010 and finished No. 2 after an undefeated season capped by a Rose Bowl win.
Preseason Heisman candidates?
LaDainian Tomlinson backed up an 1,850-yard season with 2,158 yards as a senior and a fourth-place finish in the Heisman Trophy race.
Trevone Boykin will have a mountain of expectations on his shoulders, but don't expect them to crush him.
Patterson hasn't addressed those expectations or Heisman talk once with his quarterback. If Boykin doesn't win or falls out of the race, Patterson says, it won't be because TCU was operating in newfound territory.
The Frogs' winding road to the Big 12 led through four different conferences since the Southwest Conference's dissolution, but TCU managed to win just 11 games in its first two years in its dream conference.
"It was going to be easier last year coming back from 4-8 because nobody was paying attention to us. The media, the rankings, everybody. All you heard was you didn't have a chance--no quarterback," Patterson said. "That's a lot easier for a head coach to manage."
The unofficial slogan for the Frogs this year is "Prove 'em right," in regards to the attitude TCU has toward lofty preseason expectations. It's worked in the past.
Under Patterson, TCU had finished higher or equal to its preseason AP poll ranking in every season before joining the Big 12.
In 2012 and 2013, the Frogs were expected to contend for a league title and began the season in the top 20. Both times, it finished outside the final polls.
If he was looking for an excuse, they were ever-present.
Injuries and departures along the offensive line were constant.
Before TCU's first season in the Big 12, Patterson dismissed four players who were caught up in a campus drug string. That included three starters and one of the team's best defenders, linebacker Tanner Brock.
In TCU's second season as a Big 12 member, starting quarterback Casey Pachall missed the final nine games after a drunk driving arrest, forcing a redshirt freshman named Trevone Boykin into duty far before his mind or his arm were ready.
Pachall returned in 2013 following an indefinite suspension and stint in rehab, but broke a bone in his arm in TCU's second game, handing quarterback duties back to Boykin for much of the season.
Defensive end and Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year Devonte Fields was suspended and injured for much of the same season and was finally dismissed in July 2014 after a reported domestic violence incident. He still faces a misdemeanor assault charge for the incident and signed with Louisville after spending the 2014 season in the junior college ranks.
Last season, TCU was picked to finish seventh in the Big 12 and finished third in the final polls after routing Ole Miss 42-3 in the Peach Bowl, TCU's first major bowl win since the historic Rose Bowl season. These days, Gary Patterson sports a gawk-worthy Big 12 title ring covered in diamonds, too.
"Not only are we back, we're a force to be reckoned with. Nobody can beat us but us," receiver/cornerback Cam Echols-Luper said. "We are back and we're going to be here for awhile."
The league affiliations and opponents have changed. The stadium has changed. The locker room has changed. The names on the jerseys have changed.
Patterson's program has thrived because he's refused comprehensive transformation.
"One of the things you do is you don't ever change. You go back to the bottom of the pyramid and go back to making your team be as good as it can be across the board," Patterson said. "Look at any successful business, that's what they do. You tweak some things but you always go back to the beginning."
"Tweaking" things at TCU means going from no spring game to a Friday night spectacle complete with a uniform unveiling beneath fireworks. It means buying into the spread offense and hiring two Air Raid specialists in Doug Meacham and Sonny Cumbie.
"The pyramid" is a fixture inside TCU's team meeting room, always topped by the team's annual slogan. Intangible goals like attitude and chemistry form the foundation for building up to the top, where "#1 National Champions" has always resided.
The Frogs never came closer to filling in that brick than last year, but this year may provide the program's best chance to have a fully purple pyramid by January 2016.
It might provide the most welcome change Patterson's ever seen at TCU?.
A baby?
At the end of the college football season next year, he might just be holding a trophy.
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