JD PicKell: Jimbo Fisher has championship aspirations at Texas A&M

Texas A&M received three first-place votes in the SEC preseason poll. That means championship expectations are rising — and On3’s J.D. PicKell said that’s where Jimbo Fisher has set the bar within the program, too.

The Aggies finished 8-4 overall and 4-4 in SEC play in 2021, but picked up arguably the biggest victory of the season when they knocked off Alabama. But beating the Crimson Tide isn’t enough for Texas A&M, which brought in the No. 1 recruiting class in the country for the class of 2022, according to the On3 Consensus Team Recruiting Ranking.

Fisher, who’s gearing up for his fifth season in College Station, has been to the mountaintop before. He led Florida State to a national championship in 2013 and PicKell said Texas A&M has to avoid slip-ups to meet Fisher’s championship expectations.

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“Internally, the pulse is, ‘Hey, we’ve done it before, but we’ve got to string it together now,'” PicKell said on The Hard Count. “It’s not good enough to just be good for one week. You’ve got to do it week in and and week out and get to where you want to be because Jimbo has made it very clear. He has set championship expectations before this program and said, ‘Hey, we’re not here just to win the SEC. We want to win the whole deal. Get to the College Football Playoff.’

“And they’ve been on the cusp of that before. They’ve been on the doorstep multiple times, it feels like. But then it’s a game here, it’s a game there and before you know it, you’re 8-4. So for A&M, the feeling internally is like I just mentioned, ‘We’ve peaked over the top. We’ve seen the mountaintop. We want to stay there, week in and week out.’