Mike Elko reveals he likely would be in sports journalism if not coaching

It’s often hard to separate college football coaches from their profession, with their life’s energy poured completely into the sport to produce the best possible results. Texas A&M coach Mike Elko knows a thing or two about that.

In college, Elko was looking for his next career and simply couldn’t find it.

Football became the only logical conclusion, and he hit that as a pursuit and stuck with it — to great effect. But what would Elko have done had he not been a football coach? He answered that question on the Aggie Football Radio Hour with Mike Elko on Wednesday night.

“I spent a lot of time on that in college and couldn’t come up with a good solution, which is what pushed me into coaching,” Elko said. “Yeah, I don’t know. Probably the closest thing I ever got to would have been sports journalism. That was probably like, OK, I was in the communications school at Penn and I was like maybe this is the route I’ll go. And kind of leaned more toward the coaching career.”

Mike Elko played safety at Penn from 1995-1998, where he won the Ivy League championship in 1998. He graduated with his degree and then jumped into the coaching ranks.

First, he spent some time as a graduate assistant at Stony Brook in 1999 before returning to Penn as defensive backs coach in 2000. After stints at Merchant Marine, Fordham, Richmond and Hofstra, Elko began to emerge on the major college football scene.

in 2009, he took a gig as Bowling Green‘s defensive coordinator. In 2014, he moved on to Wake Forest, before hopping to Notre Dame in 2017. Then it was onto Texas A&M in 2018 before his first head coaching gig at Duke in 2023.

Now he’s back with the Aggies as the head man. Suffice it to say, coaching was the right call for Mike Elko.

Of course, it certainly doesn’t hurt that he’s got a Penn degree to fall back on.

“I’ve referenced myself as the least Ivy League person on the planet on a few occasions over the years for sure,” Elko said. “I did get the degree, they will not take that from me. I have it hanging on my wall. It’s in the safe, too, so I’ve got a copy. So no matter what they try to do to steal that back they won’t get it.”

With things off to a decent start at Texas A&M, Mike Elko probably doesn’t have to worry about getting that second job any time soon.