Muffled strumming and husky, choppy notes – Bob Seger, maybe? – radiated from Gary Patterson’s office.
A calendar wasn’t needed to know it was Monday. It was the Texas Christian football staff’s game-planning day, which meant Patterson had shut himself up in his office to do nothing but study film and listen to his music.
“Music has always been a passion of his,” TCU Senior Deputy Athletics Director Mike Sinquefield said. “He’s always picked a guitar, he’s always showed up with a guitar. He loved to do that.”
Sinquefield started as an equipment manager at TCU and was the one to pick up Patterson from the airport when he first arrived in Forth Worth in 1998. He watched Patterson rise from defensive coordinator to head coach and wasn’t just along for the ride – Sinquefield eventually became the director of football operations.
But it wasn’t just what he saw; it was what he heard.
Music has been more than a film study companion for Patterson over the years. It strode into his life back in Kansas when he made $150 a pop playing wedding dances, and comforted him as he plucked on guitar strings, grinning while entertaining his Horned Frog counterparts before bowl games.
It settled in his cerebellum while he aggressively quizzed players the night before games and took center stage when he performed at Billy Bob’s Texas nightclub in Fort Worth.
“Greatness happens somewhere in time, where dreams and hard work meet,” Patterson said. “For me, coming from that small town (in Kansas), I knew how to work. I didn’t know how to dream. You didn’t think that you ever got out of it.”
And yet, Patterson has found the spotlight over and over. He’s taking the reins of USC’s defense and, while his music has faded to a lull, its effects are still reverberating.
Gary and Coach P
Fin Ewing III, president of Ewing Automotive Group, provides each TCU football coach with a car. He offered Patterson any car he wanted in the 21 years that he was head coach, thinking he’d choose something streamlined and luxurious, like a Mercedes-Benz.
Patterson wanted pickup trucks and GMC Yukons.
“We’ve had a lot of coaches in cars,” Ewing said. “You just wouldn’t believe what some of them looked like when we got them back. We’ve had preachers in cars and when we got them back, you wouldn’t even get in it.
“When (Patterson) gave it back to me, it was cleaner than it was when we gave it to him. And it was full of gas. Nobody does that.”
Ewing has seen the two sides of Patterson: Coach P and Gary. Coach P is the pickup-driving, hard-nosed defensive mastermind and college football coach. Gary is a smiling, community-building musician.
Marshall Newhouse, an offensive lineman who played for Patterson from 2006 through 2009, can confirm. Before playing 11 years of NFL football, becoming a color analyst for TCU football and co-hosting his “Just Win” Raiders podcast, he was enduring one of the most intense pregame rituals of his career.
Patterson’s signature “video test” was held the night before every game and projected stills of a play on either offense or defense, accompanied by a play call. Individuals had to recite exactly what they had to do on the play – right down to the distance they were from the player next to them.
“We’d go down the line,” Newhouse said. “And if you screwed up, you got cussed out or maybe some guys got replaced. It was to prove that you were ready to the rest of your teammates as well as yourself. We held each other to a standard that was established in the way that he did things.”
The preparedness that Patterson demanded of his team got the Horned Frogs to 17 bowl games, six conference championships and moved them from the Mountain West Conference into the Big 12. The winningest coach in TCU history was recently named to the 2026 class of the College Football Hall of Fame.
Many of Patterson’s players, including Newhouse, were under-recruited, overlooked or changed positions altogether when they arrived at TCU.
“Our entire culture was built on a lot of guys with chips on their shoulders. Hard work and a lot of Texas-born players. And guys with a lot of pride,” Newhouse said. “We practiced really fast. He was very into speed and football smarts. But also we were strong. I think we punched above our weight class when it came to strength in football, play strength.”
A performer, but not performative
Patterson strode up to the podium for his introductory press conference at USC with the confidence of a lifelong coach and musical performer, but the words he spoke in the drawl so familiar to college football were anything but performative.
He answered reporters’ questions in his own rambling way, sprinkling in punchy one-liners like “winning is not a sometimes thing.”
“It is the biggest rush,” Ewing said. “But some people, (the spotlight) scares them to death. Some of them are football coaches, some of them are car dealers like me. But I’m telling you, it is unbelievable, the rush. He is one of those guys. The spotlight’s a drug, and it’s awesome.”
Ewing has shared the spotlight on stage with Patterson multiple times. His band, Fin Ewing & The Wrong Direction, performs at the Coaches Classic golf tournament in Pebble Beach — which is attended by college football coaches like USC’s Lincoln Riley as well as Patterson.
Patterson typically joins in for a couple of songs. He’s also played alongside Fin and his band at Billy Bob’s – “The World’s Largest Honky Tonk” – in 2011, tapping his foot and piping out Creedence Clearwater Revival lyrics.
Few performances have been as impactful as the ones Patterson has done in partnership with The Big Good, a charity that he supports alongside Grammy-winning music artist Leon Bridges.
Since 2021, the two have worked to raise more than $4.3 million for programs that meet food, education and employment needs of Fort Worth residents.
“That’s Gary,” Sinquefield said. “Coach P is the intense, signal-calling, demand-perfection-on-the-field. Gary is a guy that when he walks off the field and leaves it behind, he cares about people. He cares about community.”
Music and lyrics
Patterson’s passion for music took on a whole new life when his personal calling for football was put on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic. The yellow legal pads with lyrics scribbled on them turned into feedback-seeking emails to Sinquefield and, eventually, rough drafts of songs that were sent to JT Hodges, a country singer-songwriter and TCU graduate.
“During this whole COVID-19 thing, you and I started exchanging texts back and forth,” Hodges said in a YouTube video featuring himself and Patterson. “And then one night you sent me a video of a song you wrote a long time ago called ‘Lonesome Man’s Waltz,’ and I’ll never forget. I was just going, wow.”
Hodges joked that he’s determined to do an album together, even though “it may take us 10 years.”
For now, Patterson has three songs on Spotify and two on YouTube that have accompanying music videos: “Take a Step Back” and “Game On.”
The former is an upbeat tune with lyrics that encouraged people to reframe their perspective during the COVID-19 pandemic to find solace in human relationships, like getting to know neighbors. The latter is an ode to college football and the heart-racing emotions of game day.
Both music videos pay homage to Fort Worth with close-ups of Texas brisket, scenic views of the TCU campus and, of course, plenty of game highlights. Lincoln Riley even makes a cameo in Oklahoma colors, intermixed with a sequence of marching bands, flyovers and touchdown catches.
Newhouse knew that Patterson kept a guitar in his office while playing at TCU, but the fact that their coach had a second act as a musician was hidden from him and his teammates.
It wasn’t until he had graduated and started his professional career that Newhouse deepened his bond with Gary, and not just Coach P. He’d go to group dinners with Patterson and other former teammates around the time of the Frogs’ spring practices or pro day.
If they were at the Patterson household, the guitar always had its moment.
“I love him showing that part of himself,” Newhouse said. “The football part, there is not room in his mind and a lot of coaches’ minds for not being as good as they can make it. Music is an art and it’s subjective and you’re trial and error-ing and you’re working on chords and all that stuff, but I think you allow parts of it to be imperfect.”
As Patterson said in his introductory press conference: “You can argue with people when you discuss, but you can’t argue with a song.”
A new ballad
The third song featured on Patterson’s Spotify profile is “The Day I Walk Away,” which has no music video. It was released in 2022, a year after Patterson had parted ways with TCU.
Patterson’s smooth yet coarse voice conjures visions of autumn leaves and purple skies with the warmth, vulnerability and closure of a breakup song:
I want you to know I did my best
No hard feelings, no regrets
I want you to know I’ll be all right
Gonna hold my head up high
I want you to know I did it all
For the love of the game
The day I walk away
The day I walk away
Artistry can reveal itself in a 4-2-5 defense just as well as in a 4/4 time signature.
And although Patterson has said offseason practices at USC have made his voice too hoarse for song, a new ballad is just beginning in Southern California.