Texas A&M fans have no love lost for Joel Klatt of Fox Sports, generally speaking. Klatt, a former Colorado quarterback turned sports personality, has had a penchant for goading Aggie fans for quite some time, and it's not gone over well in Aggieland, making him a well-known media "enemy" of the Aggies.
Over the last couple of years, though, he's changed his tune, if only a little bit. Klatt is clearly a fan of Mike Elko and what he has done in College Station, so where he was often getting jokes off at the expense of Jimbo Fisher's program, he has had nothing but respect for Elko— though he will still rib the A&M fanbase with regularity.
Klatt's recent preseason top 25 included the Aggies a bit lower than most other polls have them, which is to be expected, but there's one notable piece in this top 25 that Aggie fans will be nodding their heads about. While there are a lot of people buying into the Longhorns for this upcoming season, Klatt is clearly approaching their prospects with a healthy skepticism— leading to an uncommon agreement between him and A&M fans.
Joel Klatt's preseason top 25 is a mixed bag with one clear point of agreement for A&M fans
Klatt slots A&M much lower than the Coaches Poll, putting them down at 13 instead of up at 8, but he also drops the Longhorns out of the top 5— a spot they have definitely not yet earned.
Thoughts on @joelklatt's Preseason Top 25? pic.twitter.com/P39EewUOCh
— The Joel Klatt Show: A College Football on FOX Pod (@JoelKlattShow) August 10, 2026
There are simply too many questions about the Longhorns to this point for them to be ranked as highly as they are in most polls. It bears a very strong resemblance to what we saw last year, when Texas entered the season as the AP no. 1 team only to fall out of the poll completely by week 5.
Still, there are manifold issues with this top 25. LSU has a lot to prove before they can be reasonably called a top-10 team. Michigan being up there shows a heck of a lot of faith in Underwood, though Kyle Whittingham is a great coach.
Most notably, Texas Tech being up at 11 is a bit eyebrow-raising. There's little doubt that the Red Raiders will be able to tear through their Charmin-soft schedule, but having to do so with their second-string quarterback should temper optimism for their prospects this season, to say the least.
If this ranking were to hold, the Aggies would be facing off with three top-10 teams, two of which would be on the road. On top of that, they'd be staring down the barrel of a road trip to no. 15 Alabama and hosting no. 23 Tennessee by the end of the season.
That's not an easy path, even with a ranking from a guy that tends to look down on the SEC. Though Klatt has the appropriate amount of hesitancy when it comes to a team like the Longhorns, there's still some unearned bullishness on other teams— like LSU and Tech— and too much skepticism towards the SEC as a whole.
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