The Jim Wacker was one of the highest and lowest eras of TCU football.
Jim Wacker was truly a great man.....and a great coach. He brought class and enthusiasm to a near-dead program. He proved that we could win at TCU by taking us to the Bluebonnet Bowl in his second year. The next Fall, following a Top 10 recruiting class, TCU and Fort Worth was full of optimism and excitement....only to be decimated by the revelations of payoffs. Wacker immediately suspended 7 players including All American, K. Davis.
Cheating was going on all over the SWC in those days. He said from the get go....no cheating in his program. Anyone that had followed his coaching career at Texas Lutheran and SWTS would know he was a man of his word. The NCAA knew there was cheating going on everywhere and encouraged schools to turn themselves in. I believe the NCAA used the term "self police", which Wacker did when he discovered the payments. Instead of the NCAA giving us credit for our self-imposed penalties, it imposed some of the harshest penalties ever against TCU. Instead of standing by Wacker, TCU abandoned him and let him dig his way out of the multi-year "living death penalty" imposed by the NCAA with virtually no support. It was agonizing as a fan as our short-handed teams faded midway through the season for several years. The other schools learned the lesson.....never, ever, ever admit to anything. A & M's Jackie Sherrill (always one step ahead of the NCAA) took particular delight in humiliating TCU every year by running up the score.
Wacker beat the odds, though, and returned TCU to a winning record (7-4, I think) and was on fire in recruiting for the next year when Minnesota came calling. All Wacker asked for was an extension of his contract (not even a raise), but TCU did nothing. Minnesota gladly stole him away (to the dismay of many TCU fans, but to the quiet glee of a few very influential alums). TCU then hired Pat Sullivan who had never been a head coach of anything..... paid him double Wacker's salary and gave him the natural grass Wacker had been requesting for years. The reason he was hired? Because a couple of the big wigs (I will not say their names in the interest of "forgiving and forgetting") decided he would make a great coach based on a speech they heard him give in NY. The hire was a disaster and dang near permanently destroyed our program.
The horrible way we treated Wacker was the closest I ever came to giving up my season tickets and stopping my meager (in comparison to the big money alums) donations to TCU. I will forever be grateful to Bill Koehler for leading us out of the darkness with the hiring of our first real AD, Eric Hymen and subsequent hiring of Fran (who brought us Gary Patterson, TCU's greatest coach). I only regret that Coach Wacker never had a chance to see TCU become the program he knew it could be.