Mike Elko will be tasked with reviving a Texas A&M program that missed out on a bowl in 2022 and finished the 2023 regular season with a postseason bid but just over the .500 mark.

Elko won’t exactly be starting from scratch — he was the Aggies’ defensive coordinator for 4 seasons before taking the head coaching job at Duke — but he has a framework of the type of student-athlete he’ll be on the lookout for as he holds the reins in College Station.

“There are some intangibles. You have to find kids who love football. You have to find kids who love the hard parts of the game of football,” he said on Monday, according to TexAgs. “We’re going to go out and identify the most talented players at their position in the country.”

While NIL is top-of-mind in this day and age of college football, Elko noted that he’ll be more interested in players who foster a full-team mindset, rather than those simply seeking to create opportunities for themselves from an individual standpoint.

“We have to be about Texas A&M. We can’t be about ‘what I want to do to get a higher draft status or a better NIL deal’,” he said. “We have to be about ‘what can I do to make Texas A&M great’. With that, all of those other opportunities will come.”