Mike Elko coolly hands Texas A&M football media a charge: Look forward to the future instead of the past of this program
Near the end of his time in front of the media today for Texas A&M football's second presser of fall camp, Mike Elko took a moment. He had a favor to ask of the gathered reporters.
Stop trying to compare this year to last year. Stop asking about what has come before. We're past that now.
In doing so, the Aggie coach didn't simply make a humble request for the people in the room to stop bugging his players about something he viewed as irrelevant—though he did do that. Implicit, too, in this entreaty was a message about the shift in culture around the program—and, it should not be lost, a message that was as much to the players in the building as it was to college football fans at large.
When he was still roaming the sidelines and grousing behind podiums, people liked to make much of the idea—and rightly so—that Nick Saban's well-publicized rants were often geared more towards his own players than they were aimed at the media.
Well, this wasn't so much a rant from Elko as it was a polite (if somewhat cool) request. Gruffness isn't really his style. But other than that, I think this tracks exactly with Saban's practice.
This is a program that has been mired in bad publicity for almost two years straight—nearly three, if you date it back to the 2021 loss to Ole Miss (which you could well do). There's a lot of reasons to have poor priors when you consider the Aggies over that timespan.
But that's the old way. This is the new way.
Elko came in with a mission: to transform this program into the national contender it can be. He's already begun to transform the roster through the portal, and it's yielding great results so far. Now, with games set to kick off soon, it's time for Aggie fans—and CFB fans writ large—to see the fruit of his labors up until this point.
In a sense, the questions in the spring and summer were some you have to expect. After such a spectacular flameout, the comparisons will be a huge point of interest. However, with an actual game less than a month away, the time for comparisons has passed. The Elko era is finally truly here.
It's like someone once said: things ain't like they used to be.