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Good morning from College Station, a college town that is more a college city.
A lot of college towns have their own identity, one which heavily intersects with the university but can stand independently, at least in part. College Station is only Texas A&M. Bryan, adjacent to College Station, fills some of that role. But Bryan is three miles from campus. College Station is Texas A&M’s college town. There is nothing here but Texas A&M.
Given how gigantic Texas A&M is, the town resembles a city more than it calls to mind Manhattan, Kansas or Athens, Georgia. You drive in through a tangle of toll roads and backroads, and gradually, large blocky buildings reveal themselves from behind the pines. Eventually, you are surrounded by them, and then you quickly find yourself on University Drive, the main drag. Construction sprawls. You catch a glimpse of Kyle Field.
Many college towns feel comforting, sentimental places with idyllic if aging homes nestled amidst trees. College Station does have some of that. But on University Drive, College Station feels oddly temporary. Under an overcast sky, it feels as though it could be torn down and rebuilt elsewhere in a night, or shattered by one big storm.
I’m told “utilitarian” is a word sometimes used to describe this place. It is functional. Even the bars are functional. No secondhand nostalgia presents itself at Texas A&M the way it does up in Boulder or Fayetteville. There is nothing picturesque here. The love Aggies feel for this place comes not from the place itself, but from their own experiences within it. This isn’t all that different from most major college cultures. But it’s a little bit different. A&M is a little bit different.
That utilitarian streak appears again, as you’d expect, within the football program, and within how the greater Texas A&M world treats it. There is little sacred about how the program is run. There are few qualms, few concerns about appearances. There is little talk around the A&M ecosystem about “doing things the right way.” Most of that talk elsewhere is thin lip service, of course, and in that, A&M is kind of refreshing. But it’s jarring when A&M does things like going out and purchasing the best recruiting class in the country in an attempt to finally, cathartically validate themselves in the eyes of their peers. There’s nothing wrong with it. Others would do it if they could. What one college football man calls tact, another might call dishonesty. A&M understands itself, and it understands its place in the college football landscape: It wants respect. It knows it can’t get that through charm. It knows it can only get that through winning. It will not try to charm or market. It’ll leave that to conference foes in Austin and Oxford. It will simply try to win.
This is probably why Johnny Manziel, who will appear on College Gameday in a few hours, is such a perfect Aggie hero. Johnny Manziel is and has been many things, but within them all he’s always had that unapologetic streak. He’s never tried to court the media or the national football fan. Baker Mayfield had swagger, but he also had charm. Johnny Manziel had swagger, and he also had even more swagger, with an extra helping of swagger on top of his side of swagger. He was a cowboy, chaotic and courageous, unrestrained by what his sport tries to shape people to be. He was the best Texas A&M that Texas A&M can be.
Mike Elko is different from Johnny Manziel. You wouldn’t describe Mike Elko as swashbuckling. Hard-nosed? Yes. Profane? Yes. Confident? Yes. Utilitarian? Yes. But not a cowboy, and certainly not chaotic. Those pieces, though, are flair. At his core, Elko has what Manziel had: He wants to win football games. He knows how to win football games. He is good at winning football games. He doesn’t really care how it happens. Elko fits A&M. He comes across as devoid of romanticism. He comes across as devoid of vanity. That first part is necessary to be at home in College Station. The second is necessary to succeed here.
We talk so often about how impressively Nick Saban kept the Alabama world under control. In an egomaniacal, easily unhinged environment, he made himself king and tolerated no shit. He out-ego’d the egos. He made himself the alpha of the pack. He took no shit from his players. He took no shit from his coaches. Most importantly, he took no shit from his boosters. He made himself their boss. He didn’t let them be his.
Can Elko do the same here in flat East Texas? It’s possible. That’s more than we can say, in hindsight, for his predecessor.
Jimbo Fisher failed in College Station mostly because he lost the ability to do the coaching part of the football coaching job. I don’t know exactly how this happened, but the signs were there as his exit from Tallahassee approached. Sports are always iterating. At some point in this iterative process, on one specific iteration, Fisher simply no longer kept up. The game, as they say, passed him by. But Jimbo Fisher also failed because he let the boosters be his boss.
In 2022, Fisher got his chance. The NIL world was new, and A&M recognized the situation. The exchange rate of charm was dropping. The exchange rate of money was on the rise. Money, in college football, can be measured with a hypothetical math equation: Multiply A) the size of a school by B) the passion it inflames within its people, and you get C) the school’s money. A&M eclipses almost all others in size. A&M holds its own with some of the best in the realm of passion. A&M can’t charm its way to the top, but it can buy its way to contention. A&M has money.
Like an oil boom farmer finding black gold in a wheat field, Fisher was the beneficiary of a spectacular natural resource. He had every advantage at his disposal when it came to building the football team he wanted. Tellingly, he didn’t build the football team he needed.
Recruiting rankings aren’t perfect. The evaluators who build those are good at what they do, but they are not the best football scouts in the world. The best programs rank highly, but they also tend to outperform their recruiting scores, especially during the ascent portion of their dynastic arc. They recruit well, then they win, then they recruit spectacularly for years on end. Basically: Good college football coaches build the teams they need.
When Jimbo Fisher’s backyard started gushing NIL deals, he did not invest the resource to build a great Jimbo Fisher roster. Instead, he built the top-ranked recruiting class. If you believe the rumors and the reports, Fisher’s staff would literally visit 247Sports on their computers and calculate how specific recruits would change A&M’s overall ranking, offering those who helped the Aggies reach #1. Jimbo Fisher made the boosters his boss. He did the thing that would most appeal to them. It wasn’t the worst way to acquire talent, but the great coaches do it better.
Predictably, when A&M struggled, the geyser dried up. Boosters withdrew. Recruiting suffered. Texas A&M is probably a top-three school when it comes to how much money is available for landing talent. It’s up there with Texas, and you could theorize Georgia is there as well, sneakily affluent and perfectly geographically situated for college football power. Texas A&M is seventh this year in the 247Sports Talent Composite. That’s not bad, but it’s not top-three.
Elko will have the resources, if he can solicit them and keep them. Every resource in the college football world is at Mike Elko’s disposal. What does he need to do to turn those resources into a functioning whole? Most importantly, the coaching part. But even there, the theme is the same: Mike Elko needs to make sure he’s the one running the show.
Mike Elko’s strengths are prototypical of a certain style of coach. His teams are disciplined and motivated. Schematically, his defenses are strong, perhaps underrated as the coach’s New Jersey mouth obscures his Penn education and upbringing as an adept quarterback. Coupled with the kind of athletes he can access at A&M, this is a good recipe for wreaking havoc on collegiate backfields.
The risks?
First, he needs to get the right players for his own defense. You can access students at A&M you can’t access at Notre Dame, Duke, and Wake Forest. He should be fine on this front. He understands A&M, having worked here for four years recently under Fisher. He’s had an opportunity to try things out. Elko outsmarting his own players is a possibility, but it seems an unlikelier one.
Second, he needs to make the offense work. Elko can run a football team. Elko can run a great defense. Offensively, he needs a strong partner. It’s hard to find a better bet here than Collin Klein, but Klein is only a bet. Klein too needs to execute. Klein too needs to keep up with the schematic arms race. Klein too needs to make himself incorruptible. If he isn’t, Elko needs to sniff it out not before his competition does, but before his boosters do. There’s little patience anywhere when you have the talent on the field Mike Elko will have. That’s especially true in College Station. Mike Elko needs the right offensive coordinator, and Klein is very much still auditioning for that role.
Third, he must not become Fisher, and I mean this in two ways: He must not let the boosters be his boss, and he must not let the sport’s iterations sneak past him. That, ultimately, is going to be the key for Elko in his second head coaching job. If he can remain himself and keep up intellectually with the other side of the game, he should do well here. There are challenges, to be sure. Winning in college football is harder than it is in any other American sport, even when you coach at a school with the resources of Texas A&M. But trite as it may sound, the key to Mike Elko succeeding at this aspiring SEC power is for Mike Elko to be himself. He should make it work. He should do well. It’s always easier said than done.
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Tonight’s game? Uncertain. It’s Elko and Klein’s joint debut, but roster continuity is high. By Bill Connelly’s calculations, A&M returns two thirds of its production from last year, putting it in the FBS’s top 40. Notre Dame brings back only half its own, putting it on the edge of the FBS’s top 100. Notre Dame has more continuity among its staff, but in terms of the actual football players playing actual games, A&M’s guys have done this more often with one another than is true for Notre Dame’s.
Notre Dame will also see some debuts tonight. Mike Denbrock, Jayden Daniels’s offensive coordinator at LSU, coaches his first game for ND in the same role. Riley Leonard, Elko’s quarterback the last two years at Duke, plays his first game under center as the Irish first-stringer. Perhaps most importantly, Notre Dame sends a very raw, unproven offensive line out into one of the loudest environments in the country against an Elko-coached defensive front.
Given what we’ve seen from both programs in recent seasons, Notre Dame should still be the better team. Their defense has the upside to be the best in the country, and for all the concerns at line, the program has a great track record of developing studs at that position, something that’s stayed true across a couple different offensive line coaches. There should maybe be more concerns about Leonard, whose reputation has outpaced his performance over the years, especially when it comes to passing. But Leonard has no shortage of believers, and it seems many scouts think the baby-faced Alabaman can pass and simply hasn’t had to do it all that much in the way he’ll be asked to do it for Notre Dame.
Betting markets have implied the same—that Notre Dame is a little better—but only by a point or two, depending when you’ve checked. At that magnitude of difference, A&M finds itself the favorite on its own home field. Simultaneously, it’s possible the home-field advantage carries additional weight given all the transition happening up front for Notre Dame. The line might hold its own once plays are underway, but it could struggle with false starts. Leonard might throw and run well and make the right decisions, but communication difficulties could hold him back. A lot of the things that can go wrong for Notre Dame tonight should be correctible. Notre Dame might have big, season-long problems, but more likely, it has small, Kyle–Field–debut problems.
The playoff impact of the game? The Aggies need it more than the Irish. With a full SEC schedule ahead of them, it’s hard to see Texas A&M making the field without beating the Irish. In our model’s simulations yesterday morning, A&M made the playoff only 5.5% of the time after losing to Notre Dame. In simulations where A&M won, its playoff probability jumped to 21.7%. Some of this is that in those latter simulations, our model learned A&M was a better team than previously believed to be the case. A lot of it is simply the early “1” in the win column and the corresponding “0” under “losses.”
For Notre Dame, whose potential playoff seed is capped by its lack of a conference championship route, a loss would be damaging but far from deadly. An 11–1 Notre Dame would definitely have a shot at the 5-seed. What tonight will instead show for the Irish is whether there’s any reason to believe this could be the team that breaks the national championship drought in South Bend. It’s unlikely. Notre Dame lags too far behind programs like Georgia and Ohio State when it comes to speed and size and strength. But the Irish are getting closer. They’ve hung with each of those teams in regular season games in recent seasons. Set aside, for a moment, the environmental pressure and the communication hurdles. If Notre Dame’s line handles the defensive pressure and opens holes for its backs, and if Leonard throws the ball well? At the very least, it will be fair for Irish fans to continue to hope.
So, off they go. Mike Elko and Riley Leonard, football family turned football foes. Marcus Freeman, looking for that step forward his institution is hungry for him to take. Texas A&M, seeking—as always—regional and national respect, knowing that out of a town like College Station, there is only one pathway towards earning that reward: Texas A&M has to win.
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Some fun stuff last night, highlighted as expected by Stanford and TCU. Did we learn anything about either that will shape this college football season? Not really. But it was one little feather in TCU’s cap, and after last year, they needed one of those.
More tomorrow, as promised, about Lincoln Riley and Brian Kelly ahead of their Sunday evening duel in the desert. We’ll also have some quick reactions to today, from ourselves and from our model. If you missed it, here’s yesterday’s broader Week 1 preview.
Bark.
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