THE TIMING SHOULD have been perfect. It was the bye week, just four days after one of the biggest wins in Texas A&M history, a 41-40 comeback win in South Bend over No. 8 Notre Dame. Marcel Reed marched the Aggies down the field on a 13-play, 74-yard drive that ended with an 11-yard fourth-down touchdown pass to Nate Boerkircher with 13 seconds left. The methodical game-winning drive defied not only Touchdown Jesus, but years of Texas A&M history, marking the first win in a ranked nonconference matchup since 1979 and the first road win over a ranked opponent dating back 13 tries in more than a decade.
Now, coach Mike Elko was at a lectern to talk about the state of the Aggies. Time for a victory lap, right?
Not quite. When Elko entered that Marriott ballroom in Houston, where fans had paid as much as $2,500 for a table, to a standing ovation, he joked that nobody would be standing if Reed hadn't completed that pass. On the drive over, he had pondered what the event would have been like if the Aggies hadn't scored. All of seven minutes later, he got a question from the back of the room. He seemed to know what was coming. "Uh-oh," he said with a bemused look. "I'm ready."
There's a condition that has developed around Aggieland, the fan says, and she admits they've got it bad. The fans have been burned so many times after getting their hopes up that they can only see futures in which things go wrong. So, coming off this historic win, Elko is asked how they can believe the bottom's not going to drop out any day again.
"Great question," he says, seizing on his chance to give the same type of motivational speech he gives to his team. "That's a tremendous buildup for me to touch on. ... Let's start with this: I'm sorry, but I have nothing to do with the majority of it, so I want to make sure that that's made loud and clear to everybody in the audience," he says to laughs from the crowd.
Even though he's not responsible for it, Elko is aware of the cosmic pain that encircles the A&M program. The Aggies haven't won a national championship since 1939. They haven't won a conference title since 1998. But the New Jersey native with an Ivy League degree is utterly unconcerned. Mike Elko, as the great philosopher Norm MacDonald said of David Letterman, is not for the mawkish, and he has no truck for the sentimental.
"I think it's not fair to look at past failures and eliminate your ability to get excited around where Texas A&M football is and where Texas A&M football is going," he said. "That's not a promise that this season is going to end perfectly, but I think it's just a calling to you to enjoy what we're going through."
Elko understood the psyche of the fans when he returned to College Station as the Aggies' head coach prior to last season. He loves the passion of the Aggies, who set a single-game home attendance record of 106,159 this year and regularly show up for Midnight Yell Practice on Friday night in bigger numbers than many other programs draw for games on Saturdays. Texas A&M has all the things a program needs to become a powerhouse. The Aggies reported $266.4 million in athletic revenue in 2024, ranking just behind Ohio State and Texas nationally. They regularly rank in the top 10 in national recruiting rankings. But the math hasn't always mathed on the field. Since that last conference championship in 1998, the Aggies have lost four or more games 24 times in those 26 years. Those other two? They were this close.
In 2012, Johnny Manziel scrambled around for one of the greatest seasons in college football history, broke the SEC record for total offense and won the Heisman Trophy. But the Aggies lost two ranked matchups by a total of eight points and finished 11-2. In the 2020 season, during COVID-19, the Aggies finished 9-1 in an all-SEC schedule with only a loss on the road to No. 2 Alabama. But they were left out of the four-team College Football Playoff in favor of Notre Dame, which had just been blown out by Clemson in the ACC championship. The Aggies won the Orange Bowl 41-27 over North Carolina, finished No. 4 and were left to wonder what could have been.
So you can forgive the masses for the overwhelming sense of impending doom. In Houston, Elko took this opportunity to address that. He is used to coaching and motivating his team. This was his chance to do the same for his fans.
"You love Texas A&M, you love Texas A&M football," he said. "Stop being scared to get excited about this program and what this program is doing."
The coaches and players have done their part, and Elko has continued to answer with a general sense of disgust whenever he's asked about The Past. Because the story this year is about exceeding expectations instead of regressing. After appearing in the preseason AP poll for six straight years and only finishing ranked once, the Aggies are 11-1 and making their first College Football Playoff appearance with a team picked to finish eighth in the SEC in the preseason media poll. As the No. 7 Aggies prepare for a home playoff game against Miami at Kyle Field on Saturday, are the fans ready to believe? On Monday, Elko gave them one last pep talk.
"You have wanted this for a long time. You have wanted a program that would compete and play big games and big stages to get an opportunity to do it right here in Kyle Field for the first time is special," he said, thanking the 12th Man for its support all year. "Let's make Saturday the best environment we've had in Kyle in a really long time."
THE CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM of Texas A&M fans was perhaps best captured by French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot in 1896, two years after the Aggies played their first season of football. Studying patients who seemed to have lost capacity for joy or excitement, he coined a term: anhedonia. Emil Kraepelin, who became known as the father of psychiatry, noted that patients who were afflicted lost pleasure in things they once enjoyed, including recreational activities.
"You don't really feel anything anymore," said Lyn McDonald, a mental performance consultant who works with teams and athletes at the Texas Center for Sports Psychology, half-joking. "Everything is tempered with a little bit of a dark view of impending doom."
He doesn't think it is a stretch to apply this to A&M fans. Because he is one. McDonald, who gave his blood and sweat to the program as a walk-on member of the famed 12th Man kickoff team, confesses he's got it bad.
"That's where we're at with the Aggies and football for the last 30 years, 40 years or whatever it's been," he said.
McDonald attended A&M from 1986 to 1990, saw the Aggies' rise under coaches Jackie Sherrill and R.C. Slocum, and lived through some of their biggest hopes and hardest falls.
Aggie fan Philip Brooks can't argue with McDonald's logic. He still wants to believe, but he's got some scar tissue from his years in maroon, and lives by the Cold War credo: Trust, but verify. The Aggies went 7-0 at home this year, the first time the home fans didn't witness a loss since 1999. Still, Brooks didn't chalk those up ahead of time.
"You get bit by a dog a few times," Brooks said, "you're not going to run around the dog anymore."
Brooks was just along for the ride, happy with the progress Elko made in his first year. He loved the enthusiasm he saw this year in the optimistic students who haven't experienced his years of hard living. Bless their hearts.
"Any team has high expectations when the year starts. But the Aggies have cautious high expectations," Brooks said. "Every year you're thinking, man, is this the year? We could do it. But then you think of all these years in the past that just bit us in the tail."
A few of the lowlights:
• In 1991, a team with championship aspirations, ranked No. 15, lost to Tulsa 35-34 in the second game of the season, giving up a 63-yard touchdown pass with 2:47 left. Those Aggies finished the regular season 10-1.
• In 1994, the lone blemish in a 10-0-1 season came from a 21-21 tie to 1-9-1 SMU. Hardly anyone saw it anyway, because the Aggies were on probation, banned from TV and a bowl for a total of $18,000 in payments made by a booster for no-show jobs for a few players. One of the Aggies' best teams finished No. 8 in the final AP poll.
• The No. 13 Aggies started 1996 in the Pigskin Classic against BYU when a Cougars quarterback named Steve Sarkisian torched the Aggies' defense, going 33-of-44 for 536 yards and six touchdowns in a 41-37 upset. In Week 2, the Aggies turned the ball over eight times and Southwestern Louisiana (now Louisiana) returned three for scores in a 29-22 upset.
• In 1998, the No. 6 Aggies scored 17 points in the fourth quarter to take the lead over Texas in Mack Brown's first season, only to give up a 70-yard drive and a 24-yard field goal with five seconds remaining for a 26-24 loss. A&M beat No. 2 Kansas State the next week for the Big 12 title, but the Texas loss prevented any shot at a national title.
After Brown arrived at Texas and Bob Stoops showed up at Oklahoma in 1999, the Big 12 power shifted and A&M didn't keep up in the arms race. The Aggies' days of flirting with glory were over, at least for a couple of decades.
Jesse Woods, now an Austin singer-songwriter whose band Chaparelle has had a big year, arrived at Texas A&M at the start of this long journey into the wilderness. Woods grew up in a family of Longhorns while the Aggies were the state's dominant program, then signed to play wide receiver for A&M from 2001 to 2004, though five knee surgeries thwarted his career.
Woods was on the roster when Slocum was fired and played on the team that beat No. 1 Oklahoma in 2002 and lost 77-0 to the Sooners in Dennis Franchione's first year the very next year. But he still doesn't believe the Aggies are snakebitten.
"People really don't have a grasp on how much luck winning a championship takes," Woods said. "Look at the Red Sox and the Cubs, two huge-market teams with huge fan bases that are competitive in how they spend. It was just luck. Luck is this kind of spiritual fairy dust kind of thing. I think that's what people have fun with about A&M. It's just like we're cursed or it's in our blood. As someone who played, I know that it's a luck thing and not in our blood."
Franchione was fired in 2007, after five seasons and the revelation that he was selling a secret, $1,200 VIP newsletter subscription that disclosed injury reports and critical assessments of players. Mike Sherman was fired after four seasons in 2011 after going 6-6, with five losses coming after blown second-half leads, by a total of 17 points.
So maybe it's not all luck. But in 2012, the Aggies moved to the SEC with Kevin Sumlin at the helm and a freshman named Johnny Manziel at quarterback. After losing 20-17 in their opener against Florida, offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury figured out how to unleash Manziel, who went on to make history, becoming the first freshman to win the Heisman. The Aggies' only other loss came against No. 6 LSU (24-19). Despite beating No. 1 Alabama in Tuscaloosa, the Aggies, who were unranked in the preseason, never climbed higher than ninth in the regular season. After crushing No. 11 Oklahoma 41-13 in the Cotton Bowl, A&M finished the season ranked fifth, its highest ranking since 1939. Alabama would go on to win the BCS National Championship.
"For us, luck would be if the College Football Playoff started when we had Johnny," Woods said. "By the end of the year, no one's beating that team."
The near-miss began another cycle of hope followed by disappointment. And in 2017, after four straight five-loss seasons, Sumlin was fired. The same cycle played out again when the Aggies swung big for Jimbo Fisher, who proceeded to lose four or more games every year except for a charmed 2020 season, with only a blowout loss to Alabama in Tuscaloosa keeping the Aggies from making the playoff. Then, in 2022, Fisher signed the No. 1 recruiting class in history. In September of the same year, his No. 6 Aggies lost at home to Appalachian State 17-14. A year later, he got fired and received a record $78 million buyout after a 6-4 start. The Aggies became a punch line again.
But when the low-key Elko arrived, it signaled a change. He had been a head coach for all of two years and was the first defensive brain the Aggies had at the helm since Slocum. Brown, the Aggies' old foil who went 10-4 against them as the coach at Texas, faced Elko twice when Elko was at Duke and Brown was at North Carolina. He said A&M has always had the resources to compete, but now Elko is using NIL to get the right types of players and is building the program in his image.
"His teams are really tough," Brown said. "A lot of people talk blue-collar. Well, they play blue-collar. He's going to run the ball. He's going to use play-action, he's not going to have many penalties. He's not going to have many sacks. He is a genius on defense, especially his third-down packages. He'll bring 'em from everywhere, so you've got to stay out of third long. I'm a Mike Elko fan."
Elko doesn't like long news conferences. He says he's not running for office. He doesn't throw out a lot of slick lines, and you'll know immediately if he's not interested in the topic you're asking about, because he'll tell you, like at Missouri, when he said, "Is this our weekly last year question?" Or when he was asked about Sarkisian's lobbying for a playoff spot: "Uh, I don't really care," Elko said. "No disrespect to Sark, I do like and respect him, but I don't care what anyone else is doing."
Elko knows his fans are eager for a winner. But nobody wants one more than him. So he doesn't feel the need to talk about it anymore. Sure, the Aggies are on the right track. But the only thing that matters is the end result. And that's something he and the fans can both agree on. "It doesn't mean that we have to scream from the top of the rafters that we've arrived and we're back, or anything like that," Elko told the crowd in Houston. "But we can be excited about who we are."
TEXAS A&M HAS been intent on joining college football's elite since hiring Jackie Sherrill away from Pitt in 1982 with the first million-dollar coaching package in football history. In the 1990s under R.C. Slocum, the Aggies went 94-28-2, sixth most in wins nationally, just below Tennessee and Penn State and right ahead of Miami, Michigan and Ohio State. They had been so close but had not landed that elusive national title and decided Slocum couldn't reach the pinnacle, despite never having a losing season. So they fired him in 2002 and lured an Alabama coach coming off a 10-win season, Dennis Franchione, only for him to go 32-28 in College Station.
Since then, they've tried every model: the former assistant who became the hot up-and-comer from the Group of 5 program (Houston's Kevin Sumlin, who went 51-26 at A&M), the former assistant who had risen to become the coach and general manager of the Green Bay Packers (Mike Sherman, 25-25) and the first coach in 40 years to leave a school where he won a national title (Jimbo Fisher, 45-25). Nothing worked.
None of this worried Elko in the slightest, because nothing about his road here has been easy either. Elko's mother was 16 when he was born, and both his parents dropped out of school to raise him. He doesn't talk about his upbringing much, because he says he had everything he needed. He became a stellar student -- he made a 760 on the math portion of the SAT -- and earned a scholarship to Penn.
The coach who recruited him, Al Bagnoli, was the Quakers' coach for 23 years. He coached plenty of overachievers -- future doctors, lawyers, financiers -- but said Elko, who played safety for him from 1995 to 1998, was the smartest player he has ever had.
"We noticed that he had a tremendous amount of intellectual ability to comprehend things and understand concepts of not only what he was doing within a scheme, but also what the guy next to him was doing and the guy next to that guy was doing," Bagnoli said. "He had a rare ability. The only other guy like that I could really think of that I've coached was Kevin Stefanski, with the Browns now."
When Elko went to Bagnoli to tell him he wanted to go into coaching, Bagnoli refused to help him, saying it's a hard life and he's smart enough to do something else. But he eventually relented. Elko's first step was a graduate assistant job at Stony Brook. He worked his way up to places like the Merchant Marine Academy and Hofstra. At each stop, his teams were better than they'd ever been before or since.
In 2022, in his first year of his first head coaching job, he took over a Duke team coming off a 3-9 season, including going 0-8 in the ACC. After the media poll picked the Blue Devils to finish last in the league, they finished 8-4 -- the four losses were by a total of 16 points -- and 5-3 in the conference, including a win at Miami. He has done more with less for decades. Now he has a chance to do more with more. In November, when Elko signed a six-year contract extension that will pay him an average of over $11 million a year, he said as much.
"When I was a [graduate assistant] at Stony Brook, they were redoing the stadium, we were in trailers, that was our office," Elko said. "Because I was the GA, my desk happened to be right next to the bathroom. As I was sitting at that desk next to the bathroom, no, I did not envision signing an extension like I just signed or being the head football coach at Texas A&M. No, that wasn't on the radar."
Still, Elko's success does not surprise Dave Clawson. The former Wake Forest coach hired 23-year-old Elko at Fordham, then rehired him at each of his next three stops: Richmond, Bowling Green and Wake. The two worked together for 12 years.
"Mike is a very interesting combination of a guy that grew up in a trailer park and has an Ivy League education," Clawson said. "Mike is extremely intelligent -- very, very smart -- don't let him always wearing sweats and a ball cap fool you. He is one of the smartest coaches, one of the smartest human beings, I've ever worked with. But I also think because of where he grew up and where he was raised, that he's very, very pragmatic. He's aware of the big picture but also operates very well in the here and now. He lives in the present."
So, last year, ESPN asked Elko why he believes he's the guy to dispatch with decades of 8-5 finishes.
"I have confidence in my ability to maximize this place, OK?" Elko said. "When you see what the ceiling of this place truly is and what it can be -- maybe delusionally and maybe accurately -- I believe I can get it there. If we can get it right, it can be really special, and we can be the group that does it."
Elko has never been fired in his career. His trajectory has only been upward. He believes he knows what it takes to be successful, and he lets his players know. He says in every conversation, he's clear: Ask him to choose between the individual and the program, you're not going to like his answer. Elko is the ultimate overachiever and this program is the ultimate underachiever. He's going to impose his will.
"He's not for, let me see the right word, saving people's feelings," said Cashius Howell, the Aggies' star pass rusher. "He lays it onto the table: This is how you win. If it's not aligning with those morals ... it's kind of for the birds. He doesn't really have much patience."
ON NOV. 15, the Aggies returned from a three-game road trip to Kyle Field. They faced 3-6 South Carolina in their final home SEC game of the season in front of a raucous crowd of 108,582, the fifth largest in school history and the largest ever for an 11 a.m. local kickoff. No matter the early start, the occasion served as a party for A&M fans who finally believed, at 9-0 and as 17.5-point favorites, that this was their year. They chanted Reed's name. The stadium rattled when the DJ played "Mo Bamba."
From the start, everything felt off. Reed, who by now was getting some buzz in the Heisman conversation, played an abysmal first half, going 6-of-19 with two interceptions and lost a fumble that the Gamecocks returned for a touchdown. A&M had minus-9 rushing yards. The calamities piled up. A Texas state trooper made intentional contact with South Carolina players after an 80-yard touchdown catch, was sent home from the game, and the incident set the internet on fire as the Aggies trailed 30-3 at halftime. In college football's real-time social media soap opera, the Aggies were suddenly frauds again. All eyes were on College Station and the spotlight wasn't kind. Team site reporters had ashen faces in the press box.
At the beginning of the second half, things looked increasingly bleak. Reed threw incompletions on second and third down at the South Carolina 48 with about 12 minutes to go in the third quarter. With the Aggies facing fourth-and-12, South Carolina's win probability reached 97.8%, according to ESPN Analytics. The annual crash and burn, it seemed, had arrived.
But one play changed everything. Elko opted to go for it. As Reed dropped back to pass, South Carolina's pass rush forced him to scramble. He darted up the middle, set up a linebacker with a juke, then made another miss and ran for the first down. Two plays later, he threw a 27-yard touchdown to Izaiah Williams, the freshman's first career scoring catch. The defense didn't allow a single scoring drive the rest of the way, and A&M scored 28 straight points to win 31-30, the first time in 287 games that an SEC team won when trailing by at least 27 points.
"The vibes were good," Elko said after the game about the locker room at halftime. "I think that they're going to have confidence and a belief that no matter what the situation in the game is, they're going to have a chance to win."
There was no anhedonia at Kyle Field. The biggest comeback in school history had the Aggies off to a 10-0 start for the first time since 1992, and all but assured the Aggies a spot in the playoff.
But there was one game left. A big one. When Texas A&M, now ranked No. 3, ventured to Austin on Black Friday, it had a chance to clinch an appearance in the SEC championship game, something it had never done. The Aggies hadn't beaten Texas since 2010 -- the series had been on hiatus from 2011 to 2024 and Texas won in College Station last year. A&M took a 10-7 lead into the half. Then Texas broke away. It outgained A&M 189 yards to 35 in the third quarter alone, then Arch Manning broke off a 35-yard touchdown run to go up 27-17 with 7:04 left. The Aggies needed another rally, but this one ended as Reed threw an interception at the Texas 3, his second of the fourth quarter. Texas outscored A&M 24-7 in the second half. The party was on in Austin.
That was the roller coaster that Elko warned fans about. After the Texas game, he wasn't pleased, and he snapped at reporters who kept opening the door in his news conference. He apologized immediately afterward. But it was the culmination of an awful night for the Aggies, the worst half of football they had played all year, according to Elko. The Longhorns flew drones over the stadium that spelled lyrics from "Texas Fight": AND IT'S GOODBYE TO A&M. It was a bitter loss to their fiercest rival. But, for once, it didn't spell disaster.
The difference for the Aggies was that comeback against South Carolina, the one triggered by Reed's big play. It may have been the difference between another bullet point in the Aggies' disappointing history of frustrating finishes and a chance at new life.
It's what Reed meant when he said the team has embraced Elko's G.R.I.N.D. acronym: Grit, Relentless Effort, Integrity, Now and Dependability during a video interview in the Aggies' team room with the slogan on the wall behind him. He pointed up to the N over his head: Now.
"[Elko] talks about that all the time," Reed said. "It's one of the bigger words we talked about in the offseason and going into the season. We focus on the now. I wasn't here years back when A&M wasn't necessarily winning all the time, but I know I'm here now and I'm doing my best to make these fans happy and keep wins on the board for us."
UNTIL A NEW ending is written for Texas A&M, the Burden of History will remain Elko's least favorite thing to discuss. That's why he's here. He didn't need to be the next guy to win at some program. He can be the guy to do it at a place where no one else could.
"I think if you focus on the past, you're not going to get anywhere in life. You've got to have hope, you've got to have faith," Reed said. "So believe in the Aggies for once."
In Aggie Park across the street from Kyle Field, there's a group tailgate by the name of "Maroon Kool-Aid." The friends behind it were in South Bend this year and decided it was time to create an homage to their leader. They fired up ChatGPT and created an image of the Kool-Aid Man. The pitcher is filled with maroon instead of red, and he's got glasses and a face that looks notably like Elko's. The joke is a nod, one of the hosts, Joel Moore, said, to the Aggies' reputation as a rather, uh, devoted collective.
"It kind of goes along with a tongue-in-cheek cult deal," Moore said. "We're drinking the Kool-Aid."
Jeannie Able is part of the Kool-Aid crew and has had a little bit of a window inside Elko's makeover of the program. She's in an all-A&M family, which includes her husband Trey and their son Connor, who was a walk-on long-snapper under Fisher, then Elko last season. She's ready for future glory. But she's still an Aggie who knows the drill.
"We always believe," she said. "But we can't voice it too much, because then it might jinx it. So I'm staying quiet."
Mum's the word. And nobody tell Mike Elko about this story.