How Mike Elko has led Texas A&M to the doorstep of a perfect regular season
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Coming into the 2025 season there was a lot of optimism, but more than a few questions, surrounding Mike Elko and his Texas A&M Aggies after their disappointing finish to the 2024 season. Many fans and boosters alike questioned out loud if the man who emerged from one of the most chaotic coaching searches in recent history was the right man to fix A&M’s broken program.
Fast forward to today, and Elko and the Aggies have beaten 3 top-25 teams — including Notre Dame on the road who was ranked No. 8 at the time they played — and are undefeated this late in the season for the first since 1994, needing only a win over in-state rival Texas on Friday to reach the program’s first-ever SEC Championship Game.
Here are 2 big reasons why Elko was able to turn A&M from a pretender to a contender in just one offseason.
1. Developed Marcel Reed correctly
Reed began the season by passing for 869 yards and 9 touchdowns, highlighted by throwing for a then career-high 360 yards and a last-second game-winning touchdown against Notre Dame on the road in Week 3. He then went crazy and set a new career-high by passing for 439 yards and 3 touchdowns while coming back from 27 down to beat South Carolina in Week 11. The A&M sophomore quarterback looks completely different and better than he did at any point last season.
Unlike last year, when his passing game was very inconsistent, Reed has been a model of consistency in 2025 thanks to completing 65% or better of his passes in 6 games while throwing for at least 1 touchdown in 10 of A&M’s 11 games. Despite using his legs to rush for 395 yards and 6 touchdowns on the season, Reed’s impressive 3-to-1 touchdown-to-interception ratio has been a key factor in A&M success this season.
Combine this with the high level of confidence Elko and his staff have instilled in the talented signal caller and it’s easy to see why A&M has converted 73% of its fourth-down conversions while going for it 15 times on the season. All these factors have Reed playing the best football of his young career and why we are watching the best Aggie football team assembled this century.
“If you want to win in the SEC you better be good at the quarterback position, we had a lot of confidence in what Marcel was going to become this year as we saw a lot of growth from him last year,” Elko said in a recent radio interview with 105.3 The Fan in Dallas. “He’s become the complete player he has as he’s a kid who can stand in the pocket and deliver the football and can beat with just his arm standing there. But, he also has this incredible athletic skill set that when the play breaks down and we need him to he can get out and run and make plays.”
Regardless or not if he garners any individual accolades during award season, Reed’s development has been one of the best things to watch this college football season as it has the Aggies on the doorstep of making program history.
2. Hitting multiple home runs in the transfer portal
Thanks to having one of the largest NIL endowment funds in the nation available to him, Elko can flip his roster every season. He’s proven to be a great recruiter who can consistently get top-notch talent straight out of the transfer portal. Unfortunately for teams in the SEC and other high-ranking teams in the nation, this is exactly what Elko and his staff did last spring and they have the dividends to show for it.
Insert A&M’s dynamic wide receiving duo of KC Concepcion and Mario Craver, who came to Aggie Land via NC State and Mississippi State from the portal this spring along with talented tight end Nate Boerkircher, who came from Nebraska. After watching the offense consistently fail, lack explosion and production last season, A&M has leaned on this trio, along with freshman Ashton Bethel-Roman, to give it what it was missing and it has been nothing but a home run.
Fortunately for the Aggies, all 3 have panned out and morphed into 3 of Reed’s top targets. Concepcion and Craver have been such a hit, some national analysts feel they are the best receiving duo in the nation.
When you add Boerkircher in the mix, you have 16 of Reed’s 25 touchdowns.
“Obviously you have to adapt with the times and roster building and roster development has always been part of college football, and the way go about it has changed dramatically with NIL and transfer portal and all of those things,” Elko said. “A big piece of it when we first got here was a massive need to get into the portal and reload the roster. After a couple of rocky years at A&M we convinced a lot of kids to stick around and went and added a lot through the portal.”
No matter what happens the rest of the season, Elko has proven to Aggie Land and many across the nation that he’s the right man for the job. The board of regents of Texas A&M thinks so as well as Elko was recently awarded a 6-year contract with an average annual salary of over $11 million, making him one of the highest-paid coaches in college football through the 2031 season.
Kendrick E. Johnson writes for various national outlets such as High School on SI, Yardbarker, ESPN Andscape and MMA Weekly. He is an independent print journalist, sports television reporter and multimedia journalist who has covered the NBA Finals, NFL, NCAA football, MLB, NHL, WWE and over 75 world championship boxing and UFC Fights nationally. Johnson has also covered every prep sport possible in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and all across the great state of Texas. He’s done numerous 1-on-1 interviews with some of the biggest names and personalities in sports from Kobe Bryant, Stephen Curry and Shaq on the basketball side to Jon Jones, Canelo Alvarez and Terence Crawford on the combat sports side and John Cena, Jey and Jimmy Uso and Charlotte Flair in WWE.
