COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Remember the Swagcopter?
In a different era of Texas A&M football, it was merely a way for Kevin Sumlin and his staff to hop from one high school game to another but became a symbol of the program’s largesse and ultimately its superficiality as the recruits it helped sign didn’t translate to enough wins.
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Remember the faux national championship trophy with a space left blank to fill in the year Jimbo Fisher and his groundbreaking $75 million contract were supposed to bring one back here?
It became, yet again, the emblem of a school trying to speak something into existence that nobody around here realized had to be earned rather than bought.
For its first dozen years in the Southeastern Conference, Texas A&M and its supporters would stand on their proverbial mountain of cash and shout to the masses how they had everything needed to win championships.
Now, as undefeated and third-ranked Texas A&M pushes for its first appearance in the College Football Playoff, it seems the Aggies finally have the one thing money can’t buy in this sport. After all the choreographed attempts to turn this program into an image of something it could never be, it took an accident to fill the void with the substance it needed most.
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“People always want to take the elevator to success,” said Mike Elko, the Jersey-born, Ivy League-educated 48-year-old head coach that Texas A&M never knew it needed. “That’s not really how it works for anybody. You want your program to be this but it’s actually that and there’s a slow and steady climb that gets you where you want to go. It’s not, ‘We’re going to hire this coach and he’s a magician and we got him in here and tomorrow we’re a national championship program.’ It doesn’t work that way anywhere.”
Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko and the Aggies are undefeated so far this season. (Nelson Chenault-Imagn Images)
(IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect / Reuters)
In many ways, Elko was never supposed to be here, sitting in the palatial suite of the Texas A&M head coach where he can push a button and the double doors automatically swing open so that he can invite a reporter in for a conversation about why these Aggies seem different and far more legitimate than the pretenders of previous years.
Not only is Elko an odd fit on the surface — raised in the Northeast, he never worked anywhere close to Texas until Fisher hired him as defensive coordinator in 2018 — he wasn’t even at the forefront of Texas A&M’s coaching search when the school admitted its mistake two years ago and bought out Fisher for a record $77 million.
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On the final Saturday of the 2023 regular season, it appeared former Texas A&M athletic director Ross Bjork (now at Ohio State) was ready to hire Kentucky’s Mark Stoops. But as the process got closer to the finish line, the fan backlash became significant enough that the school’s board of regents vetoed the decision. Elko, who had just completed his second season at Duke, became the default option — and ultimately the right one.
Though Elko didn’t check the traditional Texas A&M boxes and wasn’t perceived as some exciting home-run candidate, he had spent much of his life as an adapter. Born to a teenage mother and raised in a trailer park, what he learned as he became a student at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania and then during a coaching career that crisscrossed the East Coast was that he didn’t need to fit in at a place as much as understand it.
And in his time as the coordinator here, Elko came to understand both the resources this place had and exactly what it lacked.
“We had successful moments, and we were trending in a really positive direction at times,” Elko said of a four-year stretch where Texas A&M went 34-14 but never quite broke through. “I just had confidence that you could put it together here. And I think there’s a uniqueness to being able to be the one who figures it out. That was a challenge that I kind of really wanted.”
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‘It is not sexy, it isn’t dramatic’
There’s no great revelation in how Elko has repositioned Texas A&M from perennial underachiever to a team that looks more serious as a championship threat than any of its predecessors.
If the old era of college football required a program in College Station, Texas, to do things that made it look more glamorous than it had a right to be, the new one is showing that substance will beat style every time.
Which makes it perfect for a no-nonsense practitioner of defense like Elko, whose only brand is doing the unglamorous work necessary to play a physical style of football that stands the test of time.
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“Mike, I think, has a unique ability to compartmentalize what’s important,” Texas A&M athletic director Trev Alberts told Yahoo Sports. “He listens to the noise that matters, and he’s able to shut out the noise that doesn’t, and he will not bend from what he believes leads to winning.
“It is not sexy, it isn’t dramatic, or it’s probably not going to engender a lot of attention. But that’s exactly how we want it here. Mike is a below-the-radar guy that’s had to earn everything he’s ever accomplished in coaching. Nobody gave that guy a thing. He had to start at the bottom, and he just believes in this old-fashioned idea that line of scrimmage matters. Time of possession matters. Football is still kind of a gladiator sport. It’s toughness, and he’s built a program with a culture that leads to success.”
It isn’t always perfect, of course. Last Saturday, after Texas A&M gave up 527 yards to Arkansas, Elko lit into his defense and said it didn’t “play anywhere near the standard of Texas A&M football.”
But the Aggies won, 45-42, to reach 7-0. It was their third one-possession victory of the year, including a clutch 41-40 win at Notre Dame in September when quarterback Marcell Reed threw an 11-yard touchdown pass with 13 seconds left.
Though Elko insists they’re still in the middle of a process, there’s little doubt the Aggies of old would’ve already been buried.
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“The true work just wasn’t going on,” said linebacker and team captain Taurean York. “Everybody works in the SEC, but how efficient are you working? How good is the work you’re putting in? The accountability aspect of it, if you say something, you better do it. Be where you’ve got to be on time. Just all the little things you’d think were common sense really weren’t common sense.
“That’s not a knock on us. That’s just how it was. But with Coach Elko, you’ve got to park where you’re assigned to park, be where you’re supposed to be. It creates a sense of urgency. Our whole program now is about being urgent in everything we do.”
It stands to reason in an environment now where college athletes are being paid and recruiting battles will largely come down to which school can pay the most, that coaches who can still put their imprint on the locker room culture will succeed and the rest will fall by the wayside.
Though nobody explicitly criticizes Fisher’s approach, it’s undeniable that Texas A&M was at the forefront of leaning into NIL. Their aggressive roster spending, most notably in 2022 when they signed the No. 1 recruiting class, even put Alabama coach Nick Saban at odds with his former assistant when he said A&M “bought every player on their team.”
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Ultimately, though, all that talent — and the spending — didn’t amount to much.
Whatever progress Fisher made his first few years quickly came undone with a 5-7 season in 2022 and a firing after 10 games in 2023, all played under the weight of heavy expectations.
It’s why, even now with a CFP bid potentially in sight, Elko remains cautious and disciplined about fixing what he understands to be a clear identity flaw in previous iterations of Texas A&M football.
“This place has been loud enough, and we certainly don’t need to make it any louder,” Elko said. “Everybody always wants to get over-excited. I think we are still in the process of trying to build this place into what it’s capable of being. What does that entail? I think a huge part of it is the internal culture of what we’re doing to create an environment where kids are in this for each other. Kids are in this for Texas A&M, and it’s a little bit less transactional. It’s a little bit more together. I think we’ve taken some massive strides in that direction, but it’s still a week-to-week proposition.”
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And, if ultimately successful, it represents a pivot away from the notion that you need a salesman or some type of gimmick to make Texas A&M — known inside the college football world as a fundamentally uncool place with its oddball rituals and military-adjacent traditions — into something it’s not.
Why Mike Elko works for Texas A&M
Maybe what Texas A&M is learning now, finally, is that what it already had was good enough. It just needed an adult in the room to embrace the school for what it was.
“I think the profile of a successful college coach, post-House settlement, perhaps might look different than it did,” Alberts said. “I think Texas A&M probably today isn’t fully aware of how fortunate we are that Mike is leading us because I think his profile is actually perfect. He’s not emotional, he’s very thoughtful, he’s really intelligent and he surrounds himself with an intelligent people.
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“Some of the coaches that in the previous iteration of college athletics were successful might not be successful in this. And I think some of that, historically, might have been overlooked because they didn’t have charisma or something, might now be the ones who are performing well.”
That it took a while for both Texas A&M and college football generally to make that adjustment isn’t surprising.
When Elko’s name first broke through nationally as Wake Forest’s defensive coordinator from 2014-16 under Dave Clawson, every athletic director in the country could have told you he was an upper-echelon assistant coach.
But because it was Wake and because he presented as a regular middle-aged guy rather than a slick CEO and perhaps even because he coached defense at a time when high-powered offenses were all the rage, Elko was never a hot commodity. Every coordinator job he ever got was solely on the basis of being a good football coach.
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“I’m not mad about it, but that’s the world we live in,” Elko said. “The world we live in is, that app has to tell us who’s really important, that app has to tell us who’s really good. And a lot of times, successful people don’t think about life that way. Successful people don’t always think about, ‘How do I falsely market myself through some app to make myself look better than I really am?’”
That also applies to Texas A&M itself. When Elko got the job after going 16-9 at Duke, his first order of business was to put the SEC standings over the previous two years in the locker room so that everyone could see exactly how the hype that continually propped up the program didn’t match what was happening on the field.
“I said, ‘You can talk about who we are and say whatever you want. But here’s reality, right?’ And if you look at that reality, we had a lot of work to do. So it was good to just not have to have them deal with a lot of positive stuff because they kind of lost all that. So it created a good environment for us to just go to work.”
And the work is finally paying off. For Texas A&M’s first dozen years in the SEC, Elko’s understated approach wouldn’t have matched anyone’s idea of how to break through. It turned out the simplest formula was the one the Aggies needed most.
