A spring check-in on the Texas A&M Aggie football program

Mike Elko’s rise to “head coach of Texas A&M” wasn’t a storybook story. His predecessor Jimbo Fisher collapsed after Elko left to become head coach at Duke due to diminishing cultural enforcement and raised expectations after an all-time recruiting class.

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Athletic director Ross Bjork got the Aggie powers-that-be to sign off on a $75+ milly buyout of Jimbo and most of his staff only for those same powers to throw an absolute fit when he introduced Mark Stoops as the replacement on another expensive contract. Bjork was gelded and the Aggies quickly moved to bring Elko back from Duke as a plan B.

Not the most auspicious start, but sometimes the right move is made by necessity and not process. The Aggies needed someone to re-instill some team discipline, bring back the physical defenses Elko taught, and see if an Aggie run game could be rebuilt. Elko seemed like a good fit for that and he hired Collin Klein, who seemed the ideal offensive coordinator. In year one the Aggies went 8-5 amidst quarterback controversy, injuries, and a shaky defense that allowed the Texas Longhorns to walk back into Kyle Field after a 13-year hiatus and run the ball for 240 yards in 17-7 whooping. That did not go down well.

The Aggies have often been regarded as a sleeping giant in college football with their rich alumni base, hordes of passionate alumni fans, and location next to talent hotbeds in Houston, East Texas, and Louisiana. Can Elko wake them up? Can he turn them into something respectable? Or are we going to witness another classic A&M coaching search soon?

Let’s try and move past the biases that are easy to apply with this woebegone program and take an objective look at the roster.

Space force?

This is where the Aggies have a leg up on a lot of teams, at least theoretically, as a result of having deep pockets and loads of regional talent. Houston in particular is an absolute talent gold mine that produces some rare prospects while East Texas routinely produces special and hard-nosed athletes at the skill positions, defensive back, and linebacker.

I do suspect the Aggies’ pockets have gotten shallower after the Jimbo buyout and the absolute pall that cast around the program. When you go all in on a guy like that and he takes all of your money while leaving a fake title trophy with an unspecified title year in the engraving on his desk, it is demoralizing to say the least. Between that and the nastiness of the current transfer portal, where kids can do likewise, Aggie enthusiasm is not at an all-time high.

But, the Aggies still have more money than most and the roster reflects it. Here’s the potential space force for the 2025 team:

• Left tackle: Trey Zuhn returns after a solid 2024 season. I’m not sure he’s super high on the 2026 draft boards but he’s a big, skilled pass protector with some skins on the wall. Certainly good enough for college.
• Outside receiver: Kevin Concepcion is the highlight here, a transfer from NC State who was a deep threat for the Wolfpack. His play in the spring game was promising, I don’t know if he’s an elite player but he’ll be helpful.
• Edge: The Aggies return Cashius Howell who was productive a year ago after transferring in from Bowling Green. The stockpile of talents they had been accumulating under Fisher seems to have gone bust but early enrollee freshman Marco Jones was an absolute menace against the 2nd and 3rd OL in the spring game with multiple sacks. We will probably see both this year on 3rd downs.
• Nose tackle: Albert Regis returns here after a decent 2024. Behind him things are less certain, Elko has been rebuilding the room but it takes time for kids to learn how to anchor against college double teams.
• Defensive tackle: The Aggies’ run on blue chip D-tackles under Fisher still has left one prize jewel left and they also raided the Iowa State roster in the portal for another. Former 5-star DJ Hicks added like 20 pounds in the offseason and was chucking Aggie back-up OL around in the spring game. He’ll be the primary 3-technique and cornerstone of the defense. The Cyclone transfer Tyler Onyedim was also promising in the same role. A&M is looking very strong here.
• Cornerback: Will Lee, whom the Aggies poached from Kansas State before last season, still has eligibility and returned to improve his draft stock. SEC transfers Dezz Ricks (Alabama) and Julian Humphrey (Georgia) fill out the rotation with more veteran talent. A&M might be very good at this position as well.

Overall the Aggies are in good shape in the space force thanks to some serious portal work by Elko and his staff.

Veterans at quarterback and safety?

This is what killed the 2024 Aggies.

Elko lamented how incompetent the Aggies were in zone last year and the run fits were also pretty poor. For this coming season…virtually everyone is back. This can be a mixed thing but from my observational experience, at a position like safety or linebacker or quarterback, returning experience is almost always valuable after a certain point. With enough reps guys start to figure out the patterns and angles of the game and can make plays and bad players don’t stay bad.

The Aggies are bringing back 

• Bryce Anderson, a former blue chip who came in with the athleticism to potentially play cornerback. This is his 4th year at A&M and 2nd at safety where Elko immediately moved him after arriving from Duke.
• Marcus Ratcliffe, a big enforcer (or would-be enforcer if his angles were better) who finished 3rd on the team with tackles (just 48 though) a year ago. He’ll be a 3rd year junior.
• Dalton Brooks, a 3rd year junior who started last year as a sophomore and was 2nd on the team with 59 tackles.

That’s a lot of returning experience if they can get these guys in the right leverage against routes and the run game. The fact all three Aggies will be upperclassmen can only help and I’m inclined to believe they’ll be much improved. Give me my winless flag football team for another season and I’d have them in much better leverage than last season. Good leverage? I dunno, but certainly better.

If not, Elko is not going to make it at A&M and they’re going to need a new guy with a long leash to rebuild the whole thing.

As for Marcel Reed…this is an interesting experiment the Aggies are about to run.

Let’s start with this:

EXCLUSIVE: Texas A&M QB and rising star, Marcel Reed, just became the fourth college athlete to land a private jet NIL deal—but this one’s different. In a first for both sides, Reed has partnered with ENG Aviation Group not just for flights, but for a mission with real impact:… pic.twitter.com/hyPDr8tA5v

— Boardroom (@boardroom) May 22, 2025

You know something is wildly excessive and unjustifiable when it comes with all these intense qualifications.

“I mean, you can criticize us for giving a young, unproven quarterback a PJ but then I guess you just don’t care about saving lives through organ donation…”

As if he was going to be using the jet to ferry vital organs to young, dying children or something. After watching some of the Aggies’ spring game, if I were Klein I’d be tempted to hijack that PJ and fly him to another school and leave him there.

Here’s the deal on Reed, the dude is a basketball player trapped on the gridiron. Not a point guard either, more like a drive and kick “combo guard” of the sort who hunts his own shot and weaves through traffic but only passes when his own shot doesn’t materialize.

Reed can do unreal things on the move with the ball in his hands…

…but is entirely unreliable at playing on time and delivering the ball in set piece offense.

The entire spring game we were repeatedly treated to variations on this theme:

Followed by outcomes such as these:

This is the RPO I call “Ezekiel’s wheel” which involves a post or glance route, then a wheel from an initial flat route, then another flat route while the offense blocks for zone read.

It’s not supposed to drag out like this as that incurs the risk of drawing an “ineligible man downfield” penalty when the O-line gets downfield while blocking. The ball needs to be out faster to hit the wheel but instead Reed pulls the ball from the back and tries to roll out and throw it, by which time he has pressure in his face and the safety has found the wheel. A play like this creates initial run/pass conflict and stress on a coverage scheme but you have to make the defense pay quickly, you can’t dally and survey the field or they will adjust.

Here’s another one:

The ball is out late again. Reed sees the window then adds a bounce and ball pat before delivering the throw by which time the linebacker has dropped out underneath for the interception. Notice the aforementioned DJ Hicks (#5) is also getting there in a hurry.

Time and time again Reed revealed he doesn’t have a firm command of the Aggies’ passing game to make quick decisions and get the ball out while protecting it from harm. There were some plays he executed better than others, but asking him to make a quickly timed progression clearly drags him far away from his comfort zone, which is making impromptu decisions on the move amidst chaos.

Reed’s defenders and Aggie optimists will point out a gameplan which allows him to run the ball 10+ times a game will go differently. To that point, the Aggies had this really nasty wrinkle to Ezekiel’s Wheel I’ve never seen before which should be effective:

Of course he still botches it and tries to hand off on the wrong side (the back rightly goes to the side of the routes Reed is supposed to pretend to read) but it’s all window dressing anyways. This isn’t really Ezekiel’s Wheel it’s a direct snap quarterback run. It’s zone-follow with the trappings of being a zone-read RPO.

Instead of actually considering all the options, Reed becomes the primary ballcarrier and runs behind the lead block by the running back. All of those routes running into the flat and down the sideline should have the effect of dragging backside defenders out into space before they get popped by a +1, lead quarterback run back inside.

The defense still got an extra defender to the ball anyways, perhaps Reed could have punished that by flipping it out to the other flat route or by executing the fake hand-off to the right side, but he still glides into space because he’s insanely quick.

Presumably Klein can draw up a number of designs of this nature and deal a ton of damage to teams by running Reed heavily. The kid had 116 carries last year in 11 games and went over 10 carries a game six times (nine twice) and over 20 carries once. He held up pretty well doing so, but as you can tell above he’s not thickly built. Supposedly he’s trying to bulk up more but he’s definitely not going to be that big in 2025, if ever.

Texas A&M’s fate next year will probably come down to

• Whether or not Reed can hold up with a heavy workload in the run game.
• Whether or not Concepcion and the skill players can present Reed with a lot of easy reads and throws to help make him look better as a passer.
• Whether or not Reed can develop with Klein over this offseason to be an effective game manager and harness his impromptu playmaking as a value-add proposition rather than a double-edged sword.

I think with enough time, they could figure this out, but this is only Reed’s 3rd year and he’s still pretty far away from playing under control. The recurring images of him studying the wristband before calling plays and then making mistakes of the sort you see above is disconcerting to say the least. You’d think he would have more command after a winter and spring session as “the guy.” Do they have the playbook available on the PJ?

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I think we’ll see glimpses of brilliance and moments of baffling incompetence. If that can get the Aggies to 8-4 or 9-3, it’ll buy everyone another year to potentially get it right in 2026. If not, the war drums are going to beat for everyone and one of Reed, Klein, or Elko may not be around to try again in 2026.

Knowing the Aggies, it’ll probably end up being whichever outcome is initially tantalizing before quickly devolving into utter disaster.

This article was originally published at America’s War Game.