Sonny Dykes has a stack of bibles on a shelf behind his desk. Texas bibles, that is. Also known as yearbooks.
They are grassroots cultural touchstones, these thick annual magazines devoted to covering college and high school football in the state that loves college and high school football the most. DCTF has been published every year since 1960, and says it has a circulation of 100,000. When the yearbooks begin appearing in stores in June, previewing teams of all levels across the massive state, word spreads like a High Plains sandstorm.
“We always used to run to the grocery store and get it in high school,” Dykes says. “You always wanted to see, hey, did they mention me in the article?”
The magazine may or may not have mentioned young Sonny Dykes of Coronado High School in Lubbock back in the 1980s. It definitely mentions him these days.
From 2018 to ’21, he was the coach at SMU in Dallas. This year he’s gone 44 miles west on I-30 to Fort Worth and TCU. And if his Horned Frogs maintain their blistering undefeated start to this season, he could be the cover boy next year. Just like his daddy was 32 years ago.
Spike Dykes was the head coach at Texas Tech from 1986 to ’99. He remains the longest-tenured football coach in school history, with an 82-67-1 record, and a dozen of those wins were over in-state big dogs Texas and Texas A&M. And in ’90, Spike was the Dave Campbell yearbook cover boy—a cover that is framed on the wall of Sonny’s office.
That hints at the depth of Sonny’s roots in Texas’s foundational sport—from the framed cover to the stack of bibles to all the stories he has from growing up as a legendary coach’s son in the state. (There can be nothing more Texas than a football coach named .) He has large quantities of Lone Star street cred.
Sonny’s left a few times, but always came back. Now, the 52-year-old may never leave again. While glam programs Texas and Texas A&M are struggling with coaches who grew up in California and West Virginia, No. 17 TCU is rolling into an improbable Big 12 showdown at Kansas on Saturday with an authentic Texas guy leading the way.
At the moment, if anyone deserves to be crowned the King of Texas Football in 2022, it’s Daniel “Sonny” Dykes.
