How Mark Stoops became part of Texas A&M's coaching search

As the dust settled on Saturday’s rivalry games in Week 13, news started to come out about Texas A&M’s pursuit of Kentucky coach Mark Stoops. Multiple reports indicated it looked like the two sides were coming toward a deal — that is, unless things fell apart at the final minute.

According to TexAgs’ Billy Liucci, that’s exactly what happened.

Texas A&M’s pursuit of Stoops took multiple turns Saturday night. At one point, it seemed like a certainty that the Aggies were going to hire him away from Kentucky. But discussions broke down, and Liucci said it probably didn’t help word got out about Stoops’ candidacy.

“I think in a perfect world, nothing gets out about Mark Stoops,” Liucci told Andy Staples on Andy Staples On3. “But you know and I know that never, rarely, ever happens. You and I were both mentioning him on, what was it Friday, when we were talking about it? It doesn’t happen that way. So I think in a perfect world, that never comes out, and they meet and the Regents and the high-end donors that matter — there’s a few of them — say, ‘No, no, no, no, I don’t like that. Let’s revisit that.’ And then people say, ‘Hey, he’s only had this many wins. … How’s this going to move the needle? Our fan base, there’s going to be a very low level of excitement.’ All those things they can discuss behind closed doors, and I say that as a guy that that mentioned him on Friday.

“And then, it took steam Saturday, and then by Saturday night, I’m saying, ‘Hey, this is going to be the hire, barring it falling apart the last minute.’ Well, that’s exactly what it did because they got in there and they were presented with that hire, and it was literally at the finish line. And they said ‘No, no, no, no.'”

It’s common for coaches to sometimes get cold feet and change their minds at the last second when going through the interview process. However, according to Liucci, that wasn’t the case with Stoops and Texas A&M.

Instead, it was the school that went in another direction late in the process.

“It wasn’t like — Mark Stoops did not say no to it,” Liucci said. “Let’s not kid ourselves. … They were about to offer. They knew he was taking it. You know how this goes with the conversations and stuff. And before that happened, it was like an agreed-upon like, ‘Hey, we’re going to do this.’

“They got there and they said — just like coaches do all the time. You’ve been doing this how long? How many coaches do you know that maybe even sometimes, the general public doesn’t, that are about to take a job and then it falls apart? Head coach, assistant coaches, whatever. That happened, but on the A&M side this time.”

After everything Saturday night, Stoops is staying at Kentucky and Texas A&M opted to hire Mike Elko away from Duke. Elko served as Jimbo Fisher’s defensive coordinator from 2018-20 and turned the Blue Devils program around in a major way the last two years. Now, he’ll try to do the same in College Station.