O’Gara: A College GameDay stage for Mike Elko’s A&M debut is a major victory, regardless of its outcome
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Mike Elko earned a victory Tuesday.
OK, so he can’t officially put it in the win column, but the announcement that College GameDay’s Week 1 stop will be in College Station was as good of news as he could’ve asked for in mid-May.
COLLEGE STATION, WE’RE COMING TO YOUR CITY FOR WEEK 1 ? @NDFootball at @AggieFootball ? pic.twitter.com/X4SsymVzqE
— College GameDay (@CollegeGameDay) May 14, 2024
When the popular ESPN pregame show makes its way to College Station for the Aug. 31 showdown against Notre Dame, it’ll mark GameDay’s first visit to A&M since Jimbo Fisher’s first headliner game back in 2018. Fitting. That game, in which the Aggies were a failed 2-point conversion attempt from forcing overtime against eventual national champion Clemson, was a victory for the Aggies. It was a national spotlight to show that it had moved on from the Kevin Sumlin era.
Now, the irony is that Elko can show the world that A&M has moved on from the Fisher era. As in, the era that ended with a $76 million buyout but without a single trip to Atlanta.
While there’s certainly some potential risk in a spotlight like that in Week 1 — there’s a chance that Notre Dame makes it a long night and this is anything but that 2018 Clemson game — there’s more to gain than there is to lose. Elko gets to host a likely top-10 team. That’s the type of buzz that Notre Dame will enter the season with.
How ironic it is that Riley Leonard will be QB1 for Notre Dame. It wasn’t long ago that Leonard and Elko were the faces of Duke, where Elko brought College GameDay for the first time in program history (in football). That storyline will be dissected. Maybe it gives the defensive-minded Elko a unique advantage after he spent 2 years seeing all of Leonard’s tendencies.
Granted, both Elko and Leonard have new surroundings. Well, it’s a return to College Station for Elko, who was Fisher’s defensive coordinator for that aforementioned Clemson showdown. That night, it felt like a coming-out party for Kellen Mond, as well as Elko’s A&M defense, which held Clemson to its lowest yardage output of the season.
Elko could use the 2024 opener as a coming-out party of sorts. Much like last year’s season-opening victory on Monday night wherein Elko’s Duke squad upset No. 9 Clemson for its first win against an AP top-10 team in 34 years, A&M has a chance to immediately vault into national relevance. Most programs don’t get that opportunity. Shoot, Duke had a 9-win season with Elko in Year 1, and it didn’t earn an AP Top 25 spot until that Clemson win to kick off Year 2.
Being in the AP Top 25 in early September is hardly a sign of a corner turned. A&M knows that as well as anyone. It felt like Groundhog Day watching Sumlin’s squads get into the top 10, only to turtle in November and miss out on being nationally relevant late in the season.
But in the new world of the 12-team Playoff, don’t take relevance for granted. A&M playing in a game with “Playoff implications” is significant in a post-Fisher world because we had 1 season (2020) in which that term could actually be applied to A&M.
Let’s also not forget that A&M’s 4 toughest games of 2024 are at home (Notre Dame, Mizzou, LSU and Texas). Regardless of how soon A&M ends its active 10-game road losing streak — all of the Aggies’ foes away from home are against teams who had a losing record in 2023 — the goal should still be to show that Elko’s A&M can hang with anyone at Kyle Field.
Elko did that at Duke, where the Blue Devils were 10-2 at home with one of those losses coming in that down-to-the-wire College GameDay matchup against, fittingly, Notre Dame. That night, Duke nearly closed out the Irish in what would’ve been one of the biggest wins in program history. Instead, the last minute produced a game-winning Notre Dame touchdown and a significant leg injury to Leonard. Life changed in a hurry.
Much has changed for Elko since that close, but no cigar night against the Irish. Much has changed for A&M, too. It endured national punching bag status. It’s not just that A&M agreed to pay the $76 million for Fisher. It’s that it did so and hired one of his former assistants. Elko wasn’t the splash many expected. In a sport with an 8-month offseason, those types of narratives linger.
There’s a prime opportunity for the new man in Aggieland to turn some skeptics into believers. A win would certainly do that.
But just getting GameDay to acknowledge A&M’s relevance heading into 2024 was win No. 1 for Elko.
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Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
