The way Jimbo Fisher is talking this offseason, he has to feel very confident when it comes to the momentum being built in College Station.

Outside of Alabama, no SEC team had a better season in 2020 than Texas A&M — the Aggies went 9-1 and beat North Carolina in the Orange Bowl and finished ranked No. 4 in the country following the end of the season.

Now comes the next step, overcoming the Crimson Tide and reaching Atlanta for the first time since joining the SEC back in 2012 and earning the program’s first bid to the College Football Playoff.

During a recent appearance at the Dallas A&M Club’s Coach’s Night, Fisher was asked how much of the team’s success during the COVID season could be attributed to the strong culture currently in place in College Station.

“Well, it is, we want to be in rare air. We’re happy, we had a great year, we finished fourth, that’s just three spots too low,” Fisher responded.

In the coach’s mind, that level of success can’t happen until the level of buy-in is high and the expectation within the program is to win championships.

“If you can’t see that, you can’t believe in that, and it becomes that rare air, when you get to win a championship, you get to winning and playing in big-time games and understanding you belong there,” Fisher continued. “First of all, if you can’t see it, you can’t achieve it. We all live in circumstance, we live in vision. I mean we can’t live in circumstances your whole life.

“We make excuses why we fail all the time. And we have to have vision of where you want to go. If you don’t ever see it, you’re never going to get there.”

In Fisher’s mind, saying all those things is common but actually believing it is another.

“A lot of people say those things, but do they believe a lot of people saying how they think they’re supposed to say, but inside they’re scared to death,” the Aggie coach added. “And that’s our job to help give them the information and the habits and create the day-to-day schedule that allows them to get to where they have to be as human beings.

“And it’s not just ball, they grow as people, they grow as students, it’s amazing how they grow as players. But we have to be that way. And that’s our goal. That’s the way we want to learn. If you want to be the champ, you got to play anywhere anytime. It doesn’t matter. When you’re in the SEC, once you line up in our league, there’s good teams in every league, I respect them all. You line up in our league, each and every week, you will play anybody anywhere, it doesn’t matter and that’s what we are going to do.”

Check out the full clip below courtesy of TexAgs: