Texas A&M football is set to embark on a hopeful return to the College Football Playoff in 2026 after making the field for the first time in 2025. That's going to be a tall task, thanks to not only having to replace so much of the talent that they lost to the draft— 10 draft picks in all— but having to navigate a significantly tougher schedule.
The Aggies, like all SEC teams, will have to play nine conference games this fall rather than eight, which means there is just that much less room for error when competing for a playoff berth. The time slots for each SEC game were just announced last night, and in an interview just following, Mike Elko made a point that will no doubt chafe the haters— but you can't say he's wrong.
Mike Elko fires off at Texas A&M's schedule haters for hypocrisy
Here's the money quote from the head man:
Mike Elko, in response to having a tough road schedule, on @SECNetwork: "I just hope everybody remembers this conversation as the season unfolds because they said the same thing last year. Then during the season, all they talked about was how our schedule is weak."
— TexAgs (@TexAgs) June 11, 2026
That's just the perfect response for the head man to give when it comes to the topic of the Aggies' schedule. He's exactly right that all anyone talked about was how the Aggies could not win on the road at Notre Dame, LSU, or Texas— before the Aggies went 2-1 in that stretch and beat the best team of the three.
You can bet that, if the Aggies are able to replicate the kind of run they went on last year, that this kind of talk will begin to surface once again. It will be just as ignorant than as it was this past year, of course— the Aggies, per SP+, had the eighteenth-hardest schedule in the country in 2025, but to listen to delusional Texas fans, you'd think they were somewhere in the triple digits.
In the preseason SP+ rankings for 2026, the Aggies currently are scheduled to play the nos. 6, 10, 11, 12, 15, 20, and 24 teams as part of their conference schedule alone. That's seven top-25 teams per these advanced numbers, enough to certify this as an extremely tough schedule.
That's not even to mention that three of those top four games— and five of the seven— are going to be on the road. There were some friendly draws for the Aggies as far as the timing of these kicks, but you still have to recognize that these are going to be some extremely tough contests.
The rub of it is that Texas A&M detractors simply think that a team is not that good if Texas A&M beats them. That is not due to any rational analysis of the team's quality: it is due to an emotional opposition to the team they dislike.
For that same reason, you will see them begin to use these kinds of arguments again if the Aggies make a run: again, in 2024, the Aggies defeated the no. 5 team in SP+, but you will still see haters trying to say that they didn't beat anybody.
For however much Texas A&M haters are pumping up the idea that the Aggies are not going to have success against this 2026 schedule, Elko basically just said they need to keep that same energy when the Aggies come out swinging. You have to love seeing this kind of vibe from the head of the program, and it shows where the mindset of Texas A&M is headed into this upcoming year.
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