Record Scratch, Freeze Frame Part II: Why A&M STILL Isn't SEC Ready (and Texas Is)

FADE IN, EXT – THE CATACOMBS OF KYLE FIELD UNDER THE DOG CEMETERY, POST LONE STAR SHOWDOWN REVIVAL, 2024 AD. Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko sits with a bucket of Layne’s Chicken Fingers on his lap and a towel over his head. Reveille licks up the crumbs that have fallen around the coach’s chair. There’s a picture of Johnny Manziel and Kliff Kingsbury in a hot tub together smoking Swisher Sweets hanging sideways on the wall. Scattered stacks of Texas Monthly’s are strewn across the floor, and they all feature writer Richard Justice’s infamous article from August of 2021: “Hullabaloo, Caneck! Caneck! The Year of the Aggies Is Upon Us: In the conference UT wants to join, Texas A&M is the state’s dominant college football program.“

One yell leader does a set of tiny gyrating pushups while the other four stand around him and smile with watering eyes. Four teardrops fall to the concrete floor. A voodoo doll of Steve Sarkisian that someone stole from Brian Kelly‘s desk lies on the floor at Elko’s feet. John Sharp and the Colonel Sanders guy from the legendary “Welcome to the SEC” video from 2012 bang on the door and demand to be let in. “You had ONE JOB,” they scream.

“They physically annihilated us,” Elko moans.

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RECORD SCRATCH/FREEZE FRAME. THE PICTURE PAUSES AND A NARRATOR BEGINS A VOICEOVER (the voice work is done by former Texas Governor and Aggie Yell Leader Rick Perry).

Narrator: I bet you’re wondering how we got here. Well, I am too, partner. After a 13-year head start in the conference, the Fightin’ Texas Aggies still aren’t ready for the SEC, while their hated rival, the Texas Longhorns, are in the conference championship game in their first season. It doesn’t matter how many five-star defensive linemen Jimbo Fisher landed if Texas can dominate the Aggies in College Station. 17-7 proved that. Gosh almighty, how did this happen?

—

How is A&M still not SEC ready, and Texas is? Let’s look at the reasons.

Record Scratch, Freeze Frame: Read Part One about Oklahoma

Quarterback Play

Texas A&M’s brief moments in the sun in the SEC have coincided with plus quarterback play, while the other 10 or so years they’ve toiled in the conference upon the treadmill of mediocrity has been due to the fact they’ve rarely gotten anything out of that position. In 2012, Manziel and Mike Evans brought unbelievable playmaking ability to Kevin Sumlin‘s program and Kingsbury’s Air Raid offense.

The Aggies quickly found success against a conference that wasn’t ready for the novel concept of throwing the ball all over the field. The Air Raid in the SEC was like the three-point line in the NBA; it had just been sitting there for years as if people didn’t know it could be used. In Johnny Football’s first season, they upset eventual National Champion Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and Manziel became the youngest player at the time to win the Heisman Trophy. Aggie fans will rue the fact they didn’t have the four-team playoff that year until the day they ascend to the place where all the deceased Reveille’s go.

The team underwhelmed in the second year in the conference, but still got solid quarterback play. A&M’s other bright spot at the position was in 2020, where they finished an SEC-only Covid slate 9-1 and narrowly missed out on the playoff under Fisher. That season, they happened to have a fourth-year quarterback in Kellen Mond who could run Fisher’s archaic pro-style offense with consistency.

The rest of their time in the SEC has been a bunch of botched opportunities by A&M’s various coaching staffs who have screwed up situations with players like Kyler Murray, Kyle Allen, and Haynes King. There have also been some nothing burgers like Nick Starkel and Trevor Knight thrown in. We’re not going to mention anything about anyone being ass, my dudes. And rest in peace Zach Calzada, the Aggies backed over their own Case McCoy with a double-decker bus.

Other moments of promise like Kenny “Trill” Hill quickly evaporated, and then Conner Weigman’s prospects in Aggieland died as quickly as the magician made the horrifying card appear in his shoe. “Nah, brah, nah.”

Now, Marcel Reed is A&M’s most promising quarterback since Murray, but he was yanked in and out of the starting lineup this season for Weigman, to the detriment of his own development. The two quarterbacks they featured this season are very different and hardly run the same offense. Plus, Elko is a defensive coach who will always rely on offensive coordinators like Collin Klein to establish the identity on offense. Elko, or whoever comes after him, if he can, would do well to do what Nick Saban eventually did and pick an offense, someone to install it, and say THIS is the Aggie offense and THESE are the traits I want in a quarterback.

It’s not to say that Texas didn’t wander in the quarterback wilderness for much of the last 13 years too, because outside of Sam Ehlinger’s last three years in Austin, it was rough. I’ll give the Aggie fan that the low points at quarterback for Texas were even worse, but now Texas has had three years of consistency with Quinn Ewers, who they’ve paired with the right coach in Sarkisian, behind a great offensive line and playmakers. With Arch Manning coming up and a slew of prospects behind him, Texas has one of the healthiest QB rooms in the country. Thirteen years in, A&M still doesn’t have a handle on their most important position or how to handle it.

Paper Tiger Recruiting

Everyone talks about A&M’s recruiting and how talented they are, especially because of who Fisher brought to Aggieland, but it reminds me a lot of Texas’ recruiting from 2009-2020. If you just look at ranking services, then you won’t understand why Texas A&M struggles against opponents that should be less talented.

For one, it’s much more difficult to “out-talent” another team in the SEC, as even the Kentuckys and Mississippi States will have a bunch of athletes who will play in the NFL. For two, the recruiting rankings on their surface don’t tell the whole story. Like with Texas, development and retention are what matter. Take the 2019 Texas class as a microcosm, for example: pundits often pointed to how it was the No. 3 class, so the Longhorns shouldn’t have fallen short in ’19, ’20, or ’21 as much as they did. But when you look closer, you’ll see that literally none of the top players in that class ever played meaningful snaps at Texas until Jordan Whittington, T’Vondre Sweat, and David Gbenda finally broke through by the 2022 season. The only consistent player from that class was Roschon Johnson, who was in the class as a quarterback. The talent gap wasn’t what it seemed on paper, because it never panned out or wasn’t developed. Look to the Longhorns putrid NFL draft numbers during those years for proof.

What’s this have to do with A&M, you ask? There are a ton of parallels between those late Mack Brown teams and the Tom Herman squads to today’s Aggies. Very little of Fisher’s 2020 and 2021 vaunted classes made an impact, and much of it transferred or were kicked out. Meanwhile, the precious 2022 class saw a mass exodus of character flameouts early plus NIL transfers from guys like Walter Nolen and Evan Stewart, and now they’re left with former four- and five-star players that another staff needs to develop. The coming NFL drafts will be telling, as it was for Texas. Elko has to find the right blend of retention, transfer portal players, and high school recruiting—the right fits—while building culture. It sure looks familiar to me.

Thankfully for the Texas fan, Sarkisian’s staff was able to squeeze the juice out of talented Herman holdovers like Sweat, Alfred Collins, and Vernon Broughton (to name a few) and has stacked talented class after talented class in recruiting. They’ve seen very little of the bad turnover in players that A&M has seen. At A&M, you have a thin roster at certain positions like wide receiver and offensive line, where holes simply can’t be filled. But now at Texas, you have a young player like Trevor Goosby who is able to fill in for an all-world player like Kelvin Banks and does so because he plays against great players every day in practice. What are SEC defensive lines on Saturdays when you’re playing against Barryn Sorrell, Trey Moore, Ethan Burke, and Colin Simmons during the week?

Get Rich Quick Schemes

Texas once tried to hire Urban Meyer because they were desperate to win, and thankfully it didn’t work out. Alignment is one of the worst terms in college football, right up there with Arm Talent or Rat Poison. But the failed Meyer pursuit made Texas double down on alignment. It made Texas realize that they can’t just puff out their chests with the “We’re Texas” attitude and a winner will be brought forth. It has to be built. So, Chris Del Conte, Kevin Eltife, and Jay Hartzell decided on Sarkisian together and stuck with him through a rough first season and then listened to what he needed to build the program—aka NIL dollars for big humans if we’re going to the SEC.

The Aggies have been trying scheme after scheme for years. First they tried to just join the best conference and thought that would change who they’ve been historically. It turned out that it just built more SEC inroads into Texas. Then, they threw $75 million at Fisher with a blank national championship plaque and expected to win one. But, when he went 8-4 like all their other coaches have done, they tried to buy him the best recruiting class ever without thinking about culture or scheme or the assistant coaching staff. When Fisher proved to be who he was in College Station, they showed him the door with a pile of money in a gift basket just to avoid the embarrassment of him losing to Texas when the Longhorns arrived in the SEC.

I think back to after Meyer said no, how it felt like Texas kind of stumbled into Sark. John Bianco said on 3rd and Longhorn he doesn’t think Texas really knew what it was getting. The truth was, Sark had revived himself because he had flashed in Tuscaloosa in 2020, when everyone was at home with less football to watch because of Covid. He had ties to the SEC and that what was most important to Eltife. I’m not sure that they fully grasped what kind of program builder and developer they were getting though. It definitely wasn’t a get rich quick hire like Meyer would have been.

But hey, sometimes you can stub your toe into a pot of gold.

The Aggies stumbled into Elko too. They struck out on bigger fish first, then Ross Bjork’s rogue attempt to hire Mark Stoops ignited a fan revolt. Lack of alignment strikes again. Whoever took the reins from Bjork felt like the 2022 class was a sunk cost and Elko, because of his familiarity with Fisher, was their best chance to retain the players they invested in so heavily. Keeping a few of those talented players was also their best chance to beat Texas at Kyle Field, as opposed to going with a coach who would’ve required a complete gutting down to the studs.

But now, it’s all been for naught. Maybe. They lost to Texas after all with some of those precious players, and they have another coach in Elko who has gone 8-4, just like Sumlin and Fisher used to do.

“They physically annihilated us,” was a plea from Elko, a plea like Sark once made after Arkansas in 2021, a plea for more alignment and to look at the context of his year one. When I read between the lines, I see him saying “we’re not as talented as you all think and this will take time.” It’s clear he’s asking for his team to look more like Texas in the trenches and outside. That’s not something you can snap your fingers and get. As Texas now knows, it takes time.

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So, will they finally have the alignment in College Station to listen to their new man and swallow their pride enough to emulate how Texas has built its program? Or will they sour on him and simply try for another get-rich-quick scheme, hoping this one finally harnesses the mighty power of the 12th Man? We’ll see.

FADE OUT