Andy Dalton is TCU’s alpha Frog

A smile stretched across Andy Dalton’s square jaw as the Texas Christian quarterback pondered his career, one that seems to predate the Texas dirt he has played it on.

“I feel like I’ve been here forever,” said the 23-year-old fifth-year senior, whose 41 wins are tops nationally for an active quarterback, and more than TCU’s legendary gunslinger, Sammy Baugh, who had 29.

“But then again,” Dalton added, “I feel like I just started yesterday.”

Then Dalton pondered it further.

“I’ve got one more game,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s kind of crazy. It really hasn’t hit me that there’s only one left.”

That one is a big one, the Rose Bowl, where fifth-ranked Wisconsin (11-1) waits.

Third-ranked TCU (12-0), which wrapped up its second straight undefeated season, is in Pasadena on Dalton’s broad shoulders. He’s the leader his coach wants and trusts.

“Andy has been a special one,” TCU Coach Gary Patterson said.

Added senior receiver Jeremy Kerley: “Really laid back, calm, can’t nothing really surprise him too much. He’s ready for everything. That’s what you look for in your quarterback.”

Patterson said that people “gravitate toward” Dalton, whom Kerley called a calming presence in the huddle, and that they began doing that his redshirt freshman season, when he started, set several school freshman records and led TCU to a bowl win.

“He hasn’t really looked back since,” Patterson said.

In his career, Dalton, 6 feet 3 and 220 pounds, has thrown for 10,095 yards and 70 touchdowns, and rushed for 1,583 yards and 21 touchdowns.

This season, Dalton has passed for 2,638 yards and a TCU-record 26 touchdowns. He’s thrown only six interceptions and is on pace to set the school mark with a career-best 66.2 completion percentage.

Moreover, most of Dalton’s biggest games have come in TCU’s biggest games.

As a redshirt freshman, he passed for 344 yards and two scores in a 38-36 win at Stanford. As a sophomore, he led his team to upsets of two top-10 teams — Brigham Young, and Boise State in the Poinsettia Bowl.

Last season, he pioneered TCU’s first undefeated regular season since 1938 with wins at Virginia, Clemson, Air Force and BYU and against Utah.

And this season, Dalton passed for a career-high 355 yards and three touchdowns in a 47-7 rout at then-No. 6 Utah.

“I’ve played in front of big crowds, I’ve played in big games, I feel like I’ve been put in every situation,” said Dalton, who is from the Houston suburb of Katy.

He has won two consecutive bowl game most valuable player awards, and if the Horned Frogs lick the Badgers, he’ll probably pocket a third.

Though this season has been one long playoff, with one loss or even an ugly win potentially costing TCU a shot at a BCS game, Patterson said Dalton hasn’t been rattled at all.

“What’s helped him in the last year and a half is that he’s been in enough big games that the game has slowed down for him,” Patterson said.

Dalton’s only real nerve-racking moment may have come off the field, when he asked his girlfriend’s father if he could take his daughter’s hand in marriage. The man gave his consent.

The proposal went pretty well too.

After a romantic rooftop dinner at a downtown Fort Worth restaurant, he took his fiancee-to-be to a candlelit, wooded area with a city-skyline view, got down on one knee and popped the question. The wedding is next summer.

He’d be a local celebrity, even more so, if he wins that one game, which would earn Dalton even more well wishes from those whose records he keeps rewriting, such as former TCU quarterback Max Knake.

“He sent me a text the other day,” Dalton said.

The message?

“‘Congrats on the engagement, and for breaking all my records.”

baxter.holmes@latimes.com