Mike Elko is the most important hire Texas A&M has ever made
College football has caught up to the Aggies, but there's still time for them to get ahead of the game again.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
The importance of coaching hires in college football is easily overstated. Certainly, a good one can define a team’s ascendancy for a decade or two, perhaps even longer in very rare cases—but the penalty with a bad one isn’t as crippling as it’s easy to subconsciously assume. No matter how strong the hiring process, most moves fail, and very few fail catastrophically enough to actually make a program worse in the long run. A lot of this offseason’s new coaches will be gone within a few years, and that’s normal. Obviously the likes of Indiana, Mississippi State, and Boston College hope their new HCs work out, but if they don’t…well, it’s not the end of the world. You pick yourself up and try again.
Cases where a hire, in and of itself, is genuinely vital for a team’s long-term prospects—well beyond the expected tenure of the coach himself—are pretty rare in this sport. Arguably, we haven’t yet seen one in this season of The New Guy, and there’s good reason for that: stakes are often what make a move so important to get right, and programs that finished 2023 in a middling-to-bad spot usually don’t have much to lose. The more impactful moves are ones we’ll get to later on, with high-ranking finishers like #1 Michigan, #3 Washington, and #5 Alabama that are seeking new identities and trajectories after the status-shifting stints of Jim Harbaugh, Kalen DeBoer, and Nick Saban.
This is about the turning point in the series this year, as we get into programs that have been set up well by their departing coaches and must now navigate the delicate situation of a top-level transition without slipping into a full rebuild. We looked at our first team coming off a truly exceptional season last week, with New Mexico State, but those Aggies’ outlook likely isn’t changed much by the sudden, transient surge of success led by Jerry Kill. And while Texas A&M’s last season under Jimbo Fisher wasn’t a positive outlier for the program as NMSU’s last with Kill was—really, it wasn’t positive at all—the pieces left behind for new arrival Mike Elko make his arrival of immense import.
The most important hire in Texas A&M history, though? That’s what the title of this article suggests, and it’s not a phrase to say lightly about any program, least of all this one. To be clear, I’m referring here to how significant the hire itself is, not necessarily to how momentous its outcome ends up being. Elko, like any other coach, has the capability to end up as an unremarkable footnote who ultimately doesn’t move the needle for A&M beyond his tenure. But if there was ever a time when it was vital not to waste a few years with a move like that, it’s now.
The Aggies’ move to the SEC in the 2010-14 realignment cycle promised huge potential for the program. Freed from direct competition with rivals Texas and Oklahoma—in recruiting, though on the field they now had the SEC West to contend with—they could now use oil baron money their beautiful College Station campus to build massively talented rosters and compete for national titles. Accordingly, they poached Kevin Sumlin from Houston after he led Houston to a 12-0 start in 2011, then promptly went 11-2 in their first SEC season with wins over #1 Alabama and, in their first Cotton Bowl win since 1987, #12 Oklahoma. You couldn’t ask for a better proof of concept.
Of course, the last decade and change has seen little realization of that potential, both under Sumlin (who never won double-digit games at A&M again and was fired after 2017) and attention-grabbing successor Jimbo Fisher (who nearly made the playoff in 2020, but went 20-17 thereafter). Now, the sport has caught up with the forward-thinking process that drove Texas A&M’s decision to realign, with a growing recognition of how important good recruiting and a good conference are in the CFP era. Nowhere is this more clear than in the first new arrivals to the SEC since the Aggies joined the league—Texas and Oklahoma, back from the dead to scupper their former Big 12 foe’s hopes of owning the conference’s western frontier indefinitely.
That context is what makes it clear that the post-Fisher hire was the most important coaching move in the program’s history, and the most important decision outright since they joined the SEC. If Texas A&M wants to stack up against UT and OU, they need to take immediate advantage of the talent they’ve squandered over Sumlin and Fisher’s twelve years, because they’ll never again have such a good opportunity to become a major power. That’s not to say it can’t happen if Elko fails and the Aggies’ status as an elite recruiter falters, but it’s always been immensely challenging to build a sustainable contender in this conference without access to blueblood-level recruiting, and who knows if they can regain that access should they lose it to their returning competition?
Under these circumstances, Texas A&M made the smart move and departed from what’s fallen short before. Elko isn’t a massive name like Fisher, coach of the 2013 FSU team that won the national title, but he’s a no-nonsense guy who preaches structure and clarity of purpose. It’s no coincidence that his defense, which ranked third nationally in points allowed per game in the final year of his tenure as DC here, came the closest of anything under Fisher’s watch to looking truly title-worthy; it’s also no coincidence that it regressed when he left, and that the Aggies plummeted to their worst season as an SEC member in the same year.
This hire is understated, in a way that might seem contrary to the lofty ambitions of this program, the ones that this hire could easily redeem or ruin in a few short years. But then, building up grand plans has never been the problem for A&M—the fact that they’re in the SEC at all, and that they have the capability to become a championship team under Elko, is a reflection of how well they’ve set up their coach. This move doesn’t need to be dramatic and attention-grabbing, and it honestly doesn’t even need to be a smash success; the Aggies can be elite without needing more than simple, reasoned stability and common sense from their head coach.
So, yeah, this hire is incredibly important. It could very well be the last time that Texas A&M can rely on their program’s intrinsic quality and still expect title contention, given how precarious their position is as a prospective elite. But in such decisive circumstances, there are few coaches better equipped to ensure the Aggies maintain and fulfill their potential than Mike Elko. If this is their last shot to get—and stay—on top, it’s a good one.
The Last Five Years
Fisher’s protracted downfall over the last three years was primarily a consequence of his staggering buyout—still an impossible $77 million after 2023, when Texas A&M finally pulled the trigger—but it was also motivated by the promise of the Aggies’ 2020 team. Much like Sumlin’s stellar first season, it was a moment that showed what A&M is capable of1…which turned out to be little more than a tantalizing flash in the pan. 2021 and 2023 fill out a reasonable, somewhat abbreviated imitation of Sumlin’s unexciting performances after 2012—but in between, the Aggies fell from preseason #6 (for inexplicable reasons) to their first losing campaign since 2008. That accelerated the decision to move on from Fisher, and a rebound to mere mediocrity last season couldn’t prevent what was an obvious impending decision from the start of the year.
The first step for Elko to realign Texas A&M’s trajectory towards championship contention, and possibly the most crucial, was keeping and improving on the talented roster. The Aggies lost a not-insignificant amount to the portal, typical for teams in their position, but they also added more than almost any other program through it, a haul of 28 players featuring some eight blue-chips (per 247), tied for second nationally. There’s a ton of turnover—in the roster as well as the coaching staff, which didn’t retain much from the Fisher era—but A&M’s talent is still on par with the titans of the SEC and of FBS as a whole, at least in theory. With a rather weak schedule outside their three toughest games, the Aggies have a clear path to nine wins; the matchups that will define Elko’s first season, though, are home dates with Notre Dame (Aug. 31), LSU (Oct. 26), and all-important rival Texas (Nov. 30) in the return of the Lone Star Showdown.
The Next Five Years
I’ve spent a lot of the last five years being relentlessly negative about Texas A&M. I don’t regret any of it, because I still feel now what I felt from the moment I got into college football: this program has been given a remarkable amount of credit for achievements that have yet to actually manifest. In four of the last five years, the Aggies have entered the season ranked and finished unranked, well below where they started; that includes a #6 preseason ranking in 2022 immediately after going #6 to 8-4, then a #23 preseason ranking in 2023 after that 2022 team finished under .500 altogether. As a fan of one of the teams that usually, and predictably, goes the other way and has to climb into the rankings after receiving minimal preseason respect, A&M’s largely unearned status at the start of every season has been a perpetual annoyance, an unaccomplished program taking up space while teams with real success are overlooked.
I get it, though. The baseline for the Aggies has rarely been that bad, almost always good enough that you can reasonably call them a preseason contender the next year, and the reasons to believe despite a lack of results are undeniably tempting. I honestly want this team to be good—not just because anyone who sticks it to Texas and Oklahoma is a friend of mine, but because teams with serious potential to shake up the limited hierarchy of national title contenders are few and far between. There’s less opportunity than ever to build a new elite in this sport, and it’s possible that Texas A&M will be the last team to open a window in which they can join the club.
If Elko can deliver on that possibility (and I’m a firm believer that he’s the right guy to), I hope he does pull it off. After all the ambitious dreams of the last twelve years that ultimately fell short, perhaps promising nothing but striving for much is the way to go. And if the way forward for Texas A&M lies in sensibility and stability, however far it’ll take them, Mike Elko is their man.
Arguably, it didn’t really—the Aggies were more on the caliber of Florida, which they beat at home by a field goal for one of the biggest wins of Fisher’s tenure, then of true title contender Alabama, which slaughtered them 52-24 in Tuscaloosa. But whatever way you want to look at it, a 9-1 season and #4 finish makes it very hard to fire the coach responsible for such accomplishments within two years, no matter how rapid and dizzying the subsequent decline.