Mike Elko reveals rationale for hiring Tommy Moffitt, importance of head strength & conditioning coach

It’s no secret that new head coaches come with new coaching staffs, but a role on those staffs that isn’t talked about enough is the head strength and conditioning coach. It’s a position that often spends more time with the players than anyone else on the entire staff and is tasked with building culture, toughness, and many other intangibles in the offseason.

New Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko brought one of the best of the best with him to College Station this offseason, hiring long-time LSU staffer Tommy Moffitt to his staff. Elko explained the addition at SEC Media Days on Thursday while also touching on the importance of his role.

“It was interesting, obviously the thing everyone always asks about offensive coordinator. I’m a defensive minded head coach and so you get hired and everyone wants to talk about who’s the OC, who’s the OC?” Elko said. “But in truth sometimes the most important hire you make is your strength and conditioning coach.

“Because that guy spends so much time with your team, that guy establishes your toughness level, that guy establishes your culture, he establishes your discipline level. And so we took a lot of time to kind of research and make that hire.”

Given the importance of the head strength and conditioning coach, Elko knew he had to make a slam dunk hire in order to meet the high expectations that come with the inheritance of the Texas A&M program. And not many in the industry fit that mold more than Tommy Moffitt.

“I had never met Coach Moffitt in my career, we had had one of his assistants on our staff at Duke and so I knew of him. When I dug into him and really started interviewing and talking to him, I was blown away by how modern he was,” Elko said. “When you have a guy who has had as much success as he has and has a resume as long as he does, three national championships for three different head coaches, you anticipate maybe there being a little bit of an old school thought process and it was the exact opposite.”

Moffitt’s track record alone during his 21 seasons at LSU makes him more than capable of stepping in the same role for Texas A&M. But that blended with his forward thinking within the craft makes has the potential to make the Aggies a force to be reckoned with as early as this season under Elko and Moffit’s leadership.

“He’s extremely well read, he’s modern, he’s into sports science at the highest level, he’s into training our kids at maximum efficiency and those were the things that were really important to me,” Elko said. “And so when I identified that here was a guy that had the amount of success that he had but had kind of modified his program over the years to change with the times.

“It was a no brainer for me to try to bring him into College Station.”