Mike Elko compares transfer portal to 'the neighborhood garage sale'

There are numerous approaches from head coaches to how they use the Transfer Portal and for first-year Texas A&M Aggies head coach Mike Elko, his approach is similar to that of a neighborhood garage sale.

Elko explained his analogy on The Aggie Football Hour. There, he explained that there are great opportunities coming out of the Transfer Portal, but you have to put in the work to find them, similar to how a garage sale might work.

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“Here’s the analogy I’ll make, and I don’t know if I should say this live but the people in this audience all appreciate this, the Transfer Portal is like the neighborhood garage sale,” Mike Elko said. “It’s not just go in and pick out whatever you want and everything’s good. Within the neighborhood garage sale, there’s a lot of really good things but it takes a lot of work.”

Many first-year head coaches have seen a lot of turnover in their first year, as players have the freedom of movement to decide they may not want to play for the new staff or the incoming staff may want to quickly flip the roster. For Mike Elko, that showed up when the Aggies lost 29 players and brought in 27 players through the Transfer Portal. That helped Texas A&M put together the 63rd-ranked transfer class, according to the On3 College Football Team Transfer Portal Rankings.

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“You’ve got to get out of the car, go look around the whole lot. You’ve got to look under some blankets. Like, you’ve got to find what’s right. I think that’s how you approach the Transfer Portal,” Elko said. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, hey, here’s a shiny thing. I bet it’s gonna have nothing wrong with it,’ right? You kind of go in with a jaded thought process of, ‘Okay, why is he transferring? How is he gonna help us? What’s the character like? What’s he gonna do when he gets here? What’s his role gonna be? Is he gonna be able to handle his role?’ And you kind of put all of that together into a puzzle to project what it’s gonna look like on your roster. I think that’s how we approach it.”

Because of the Transfer Portal, fans tend to expect new coaches to turn programs around quickly. However, there is a risk that comes with that approach.

“That’s not the fans’ perspective. The fans’ perspective is everyone in the Transfer Portal is amazing,” Elko said. “But I think you can see, and you see it around the country, some people get it really, really wrong. That can doom a season. Some people get it really, really right and that can propel a season. I think you’ve got to be really, really careful and deliberate about how you attack that portal.”

To this point in 2024, Mike Elko’s approach has been fairly successful, going 2-1 through three weeks with a win in their first SEC game against the Florida Gators. Next, the Aggies are set to take on Bowling Green.