Spring check-ins: Poking the Aggie giant to see if it will wake up

There's still talent on this Aggie roster, some exceptional talent even. Will they have a good football team?

Mike Elko’s rise to “head coach of Texas A&M” wasn’t a storybook story. His predecessor Jimbo Fisher collapsed after Elko left to become head coach at Duke due to diminishing cultural enforcement and raised expectations after an all-time recruiting class.

To hear some tell it, athletic director Ross Bjork convinced the Aggie powers-that-be to fire Jimbo and chase Detroit Lions coach and Aggie alumni Dan Campbell. It’s easier to collect a massive buy-out if you can sell a future like that.

There was a similar plot to fire Mack Brown once and replace him with Nick Saban, but Brown got wise and figured if he could outlive the Saban speculation they wouldn’t be able to remove him. He managed the first part only to realize the will to push him out was still too strong and then chose to resign. Ever the politician, Mack.

Well Bjork got the Aggie powers to sign off on a $75+ milly buyout of Jimbo and most of his staff only for those same powers to throw an absolute fit when he introduced Mark Stoops as the replacement on another expensive contract. Bjork was gelded and the Aggies quickly moved to bring Elko back from Duke.

So, not an auspicious start, but sometimes the right move is made by necessity and not process. The Aggies needed someone to re-instill some team discipline, bring back the physical defenses Elko taught, and see if an Aggie run game could be rebuilt. Elko seemed like a good fit for that and he hired Collin Klein who seemed the ideal offensive coordinator. In year one the Aggies went 8-5 amidst quarterback controversy, injuries, and a shaky defense that allowed the Texas Longhorns to walk back into Kyle Field after a 13-year hiatus and run the ball for 240 yards in 17-7 whooping. That did not go down well.

The Aggies have often been regarded as a sleeping giant in college football with their rich alumni base, hordes of passionate alumni fans, and location next to talent hotbeds in Houston, East Texas, and Louisiana. Can Elko wake them up? Can he turn them into something respectable? Or are we going to witness another classic A&M coaching search soon?

Let’s try and move past the biases that are easy to apply with this woebegone program and apply the America’s War Game paradigms.