Mike Elko calls out teams canceling spring games for tampering: 'I'm not buying some of that stuff'

There have been some high-profile instances of schools altering their spring football games this year, for one reason or another. Texas A&M coach Mike Elko isn’t one of the coaches doing so.

Nor does he fully buy some of the reasons put out there for teams scrapping them. Already Nebraska and Texas have opted not to host a traditional spring game, among others.

At Nebraska, the reason provided by coach Matt Rhule was tampering. He believes putting your team in a spotlight on television allows other programs to get an easy scout of your players and begin influencing them to enter the NCAA transfer portal.

Mike Elko is skeptical. He just doesn’t see it.

“This thought of people recruiting off your roster or some of those things, I’m not buying some of that stuff,” Mike Elko said on Wednesday. “So we’ll continue to have a spring game until we make it to the semifinals and then we’ll rediscover kind of what our offseason looks like.”

That brings us to the second major reason that some coaches have altered their spring game plans. Length of the season.

With the expanded College Football Playoff, some teams are playing into January. They can play as many as 16 games in a year, a significant expansion from what used to occur.

That’s a very different reason than tampering, which Mike Elko doesn’t think is a legitimate factor. The season length, on the other hand, is a valid concern in his mind.

“Yeah, I, all right, let’s get into Year 2. We know each other now a little bit, right?” Mike Elko said to reporters. “So I think that I would always challenge people to read into what people are saying and try to figure out whether it actually makes sense.

“I think there’s two different elements of this. There’s some teams who play real long seasons, and I think there’s a reality to having to redefine what your next offseason is like with the extended playoff and how many games some teams are playing. That’s real.”