Texas A&M Football is Inarguably an Elite Job in CFB

Texas A&M Football Among the Top Jobs in the Country

Recently, the inimitable Josh Pate has been coming under fire for stating something that I would think any individual unencumbered by prejudice should be able to see as plain fact: that Texas A&M football is an elite job. You can see the clip here or in the tweet below:

If you can’t listen to the whole thing, here’s a quote that helps kind of sum up his line of thinking:

"It didn’t matter to Kirby Smart that Georgia hadn’t won a title since the advent of MTV. It didn’t hold him back a bit. You know why? Because he’s an elite coach. Kirby Smart, if he was at Texas A&M, would do exactly what he’s doing at Georgia. Nick Saban, if he took the A&M job in ’07 instead of ‘Bama, would do exactly what he’s doing at Alabama. Elite coaches are going to win anywhere they have elite resources. They have the critical traits and the boxes checked. They have that at A&M. The difference is they have not harnessed that in an effort to hire the right candidate."

He later on delineates the distinction between program and job, which is useful here. Texas A&M football has not been a top-5 program in its history. Texas A&M football is a top-5 job. Here’s a helpful guide for those of you too intransigent to recognize the difference between these two. You’re discussing Texas A&M as a program if you bring up:

• Winning percentage, either overall or in conference
• Conference or national championships
• NFL draft picks
• AP Poll rankings or finishes

Broadly speaking, these are historical accomplishments. In other words, you can think of this as what has been done in the past at Texas A&M. If you bring those things up when discussing Texas A&M football as a job, then you are confusing your categories. You’re discussing Texas A&M as a job if you bring up:

• Institutional commitment to football
• Fan support
• Geographic location relative to recruiting
• Conference affiliation
• Positionality with regard to the future landscape of the sport (NIL and realignment)

Broadly speaking, these are present realities, and ones for which the Aggies are extremely well-positioned. Now, you may say “it’s a present reality that aggy havent wun nuthin!” You are confusing the categories. Unless you subscribe to some kind of radical postmodern historical skepticism, then it will always be the case that, at any given time, a college football program has accomplished only that which it has accomplished. This is tautological and irrelevant to the evaluation of the job.

Too often, whether willfully or out of complete ignorance of the flawed nature of the reasoning, college football fans act as though history is destiny. This, for example, was the case with Clemson—until it wasn’t. They were the program that always found a way to lose—until they weren’t. What changed? If you ask most Clemson fans, it was the institutional commitment to football; and this actually happened during Dabo’s tenure there! As Pate points out, it would be manifestly moronic to insist, if Kirby Smart or Nick Saban somehow took the A&M job in some fantasy world, that they would therefore be consigned to mediocrity.

The point is this: to act like Texas A&M football is not an elite job based on the criteria that actually are relevant to that specific evaluation is and must be borne out of either ignorance of the criteria, willful blindness to one or more of these categories as regards Texas A&M, or because you think it’s funny. If it’s the latter, that’s fine! Just don’t act like it’s something different.