Dave WilsonDec 17, 2025, 07:00 AM ETCloseDave Wilson is a college football reporter. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun.Follow on X
Mike Elko defines success, issues challenge to Aggies’ 12th Man (2:41)Mike Elko outlines his postseason expectations and calls on fans to play a role at Kyle Field on Saturday as No. 7 Texas A&M faces No. 10 Miami while chasing its first national championship since 1939. (2:41)
It was the bye week, just four days after one of the biggest wins in Texas A&M history, a 41-40 comeback win over No. 8 Notre Dame in South Bend. Marcel Reed marched the Aggies down the field on a 13-play, 74-yard drive that ended with an 11-yard fourth-down touchdown pass to Nate Boerkircher with 13 seconds left.
The methodical game-winning drive defied not only Touchdown Jesus, but years of Texas A&M history, marking its first win in a ranked nonconference matchup on the road since 1979.
Not quite. When Elko entered that Marriott ballroom in Houston, where fans had paid as much as $2,500 for a table, to a standing ovation, he joked that nobody would be standing if Reed hadn’t completed that pass. On the drive over, he had pondered what the event would have been like if the Aggies hadn’t scored. All of seven minutes later, he got a question from the back of the room. He seemed to know what was coming. “Uh-oh,” he said with a bemused look. “I’m ready.”
There’s a condition that has developed around Aggieland, the fan said, and she admitted they’ve got it bad. The fans have been burned so many times after getting their hopes up that they can only see futures in which things go wrong. So coming off this historic win, Elko was asked how they can believe the bottom’s not going to drop out any day again.
“Great question. That’s a tremendous buildup for me to touch on. … Let’s start with this: I’m sorry, but I have nothing to do with the majority of it, so I want to make sure that that’s made loud and clear to everybody in the audience,” he responds, prompting laughter from the crowd.
Even though he’s not responsible for it, Elko is aware of the cosmic pain that encircles the A&M program. The Aggies haven’t won a national championship since 1939. They haven’t won a conference title since 1998. But the New Jersey native with an Ivy League degree is utterly unconcerned. Mike Elko, as the great philosopher Norm MacDonald said of David Letterman, is not for the mawkish, and he has no truck for the sentimental.
“I think it’s not fair to look at past failures and eliminate your ability to get excited around where Texas A&M football is and where Texas A&M football is going,” he said. “That’s not a promise that this season is going to end perfectly, but I think it’s just a calling to you to enjoy what we’re going through.”
Texas A&M has all the things a program needs to become a powerhouse. The Aggies reported $266.4 million in athletic revenue in 2024, ranking just behind Ohio State and Texas nationally. They regularly rank in the top 10 in national recruiting rankings. But the math hasn’t always mathed on the field. Since that last conference championship in 1998, the Aggies have lost four or more games 24 times in those 26 years. Those other two? They were this close.
So you can forgive the masses for the overwhelming sense of impending doom. In Houston, Elko took this opportunity to address that. He is used to coaching and motivating his team. This was his chance to do the same for his fans.
“You have wanted this for a long time. You have wanted a program that would compete and play big games and big stages [and] to get an opportunity to do it right here in Kyle Field for the first time is special,” he said, thanking the 12th Man for its support all year. “Let’s make Saturday the best environment we’ve had in Kyle in a really long time.”
THE CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM of Texas A&M fans was perhaps best captured by French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot in 1896, two years after the Aggies played their first season of football. Studying patients who seemed to have lost capacity for joy or excitement, he coined a term: anhedonia. Emil Kraepelin, who became known as the father of psychiatry, noted that patients who were afflicted lost pleasure in things they once enjoyed, including recreational activities.
“You don’t really feel anything anymore,” said Lyn McDonald, a mental performance consultant who works with teams and athletes at the Texas Center for Sports Psychology, half-joking. “Everything is tempered with a little bit of a dark view of impending doom.”
He doesn’t think it is a stretch to apply this to A&M fans. Because he is one. McDonald, who gave his blood and sweat to the program as a walk-on member of the famed 12th Man kickoff team, confesses he’s got it bad.
“That’s where we’re at with the Aggies and football for the last 30 years, 40 years or whatever it’s been,” he said.
McDonald attended A&M from 1986 to 1990, saw the Aggies’ rise under coaches Jackie Sherrill and R.C. Slocum, and lived through some of their biggest hopes and hardest falls.
Brooks was just along for the ride, happy with the progress Elko made in his first year. He loved the enthusiasm he saw this year in the optimistic students who haven’t experienced his years of hard living. Bless their hearts.
“Any team has high expectations when the year starts. But the Aggies have cautious high expectations,” Brooks said. “Every year you’re thinking, man, is this the year? We could do it. But then you think of all these years in the past that just bit us in the tail.”
• In 1991, a team with championship aspirations, ranked No. 15, lost to Tulsa 35-34 in the second game of the season, giving up a 63-yard touchdown pass with 2:47 left. Those Aggies finished the regular season 10-1.
• In 1994, the lone blemish in a 10-0-1 season came from a 21-21 tie to 1-9-1 SMU. Hardly anyone saw it anyway, because the Aggies were on probation, banned from TV and a bowl for a total of $18,000 in payments made by a booster for no-show jobs for a few players. One of the Aggies’ best teams finished No. 8 in the final AP poll.
• The No. 13 Aggies started 1996 in the Pigskin Classic against BYU when a Cougars quarterback named Steve Sarkisian torched the Aggies’ defense, going 33-of-44 for 536 yards and six touchdowns in a 41-37 upset. In Week 2, the Aggies turned the ball over eight times and Southwestern Louisiana (now Louisiana) returned three for scores in a 29-22 upset.
• In 1998, the No. 6 Aggies scored 17 points in the fourth quarter to take the lead over Texas in Mack Brown’s first season, only to give up a 70-yard drive and a 24-yard field goal with five seconds remaining for a 26-24 loss. A&M beat No. 2 Kansas State the next week for the Big 12 title, but the loss to Texas prevented any shot at a national title.
After Brown arrived at Texas and Bob Stoops showed up at Oklahoma in 1999, the Big 12’s balance of power shifted and A&M didn’t keep up in the arms race. The Aggies’ days of flirting with glory were over, at least for a couple of decades.
Jesse Woods, now an Austin singer-songwriter whose band Chaparelle has had a big year, arrived at Texas A&M at the start of this long journey into the wilderness. Woods grew up in a family of Longhorns while the Aggies were the state’s dominant program, then signed to play wide receiver for A&M from 2001 to 2004, though five knee surgeries thwarted his career.
Woods was on the roster when Slocum was fired and he played on the team that beat No. 1 Oklahoma in 2002 and lost 77-0 to the Sooners in Dennis Franchione’s first year the very next year. But he still doesn’t believe the Aggies are snakebitten.
“For us, luck would be if the College Football Playoff started when we had Johnny,” Woods said. “By the end of the year, no one’s beating that team.”
But when the low-key Elko arrived, it signaled a change. He had been a head coach for all of two years and was the first defensive brain the Aggies had at the helm since Slocum. Brown, the Aggies’ old foil who went 10-4 against them as the coach at Texas, faced Elko twice when Elko was at Duke and Brown was at North Carolina. He said A&M has always had the resources to compete, but now Elko is using NIL to get the right types of players and is building the program in his image.
“His teams are really tough,” Brown said. “A lot of people talk blue-collar. Well, they play blue-collar. He’s going to run the ball. He’s going to use play-action, he’s not going to have many penalties. He’s not going to have many sacks. He is a genius on defense, especially his third-down packages. He’ll bring ’em from everywhere, so you’ve got to stay out of third long. I’m a Mike Elko fan.”
Since then, they’ve tried every model: the former assistant who became the hot up-and-comer from the Group of 5 program (Houston’s Kevin Sumlin, who went 51-26 at A&M), the former assistant who had risen to become the coach and general manager of the Green Bay Packers (Mike Sherman, 25-25) and the first coach in 40 years to leave a school where he won a national title (Jimbo Fisher, 45-25). Nothing worked.
The coach who recruited him, Al Bagnoli, was the Quakers’ coach for 23 years. He coached plenty of overachievers — future doctors, lawyers, financiers — but said Elko, who played safety for him from 1995 to 1998, was the smartest player he has ever had.
“We noticed that he had a tremendous amount of intellectual ability to comprehend things and understand concepts of not only what he was doing within a scheme, but also what the guy next to him was doing and the guy next to that guy was doing,” Bagnoli said. “He had a rare ability. The only other guy like that I could really think of that I’ve coached was Kevin Stefanski, with the Browns now.”
When Elko went to Bagnoli to tell him he wanted to go into coaching, Bagnoli refused to help him, saying it’s a hard life and he’s smart enough to do something else. But he eventually relented. Elko’s first step was a graduate assistant job at Stony Brook. He worked his way up to places like the Merchant Marine Academy and Hofstra. At each stop, his teams were better than they’d ever been before or since.