Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko leads his team onto the field for the start of a first round College Football Playoff game against Miami in College Station, Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025.
Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle
We have reached the talking season portion of the college football calendar.
With SEC Media Days taking place all week in Tampa, Fla., SEC coaches and players are making their rounds and Wednesday was Texas A&M‘s day on the stage. Head coach Mike Elko joined “The Invasion” on Sportsradio 96.7 FM/1310 The Ticket (KTCK-AM) and discussed the Aggies’ upcoming season, how he approaches talent acquisition, what he learned from A&M’s playoff appearance and more.
See highlights of the conversation below, edited lightly for clarity.
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It seems the grind never stops with the craziness of the college football calendar and you were very busy during the transfer portal season.
Mike Elko:Â Yeah, I think it’s important to manage your roster the way you need to, and obviously we try to base everything around high school recruiting. But we’re still in the infant stages of building our program, and so we only have two high school classes in so far, and so there’s still some holes left in the senior classes from the transition from Jimbo to me, and so we were a little bit more active this year in the portal, with especially both lines of scrimmage, trying to make sure that we got the competition from the veterans that we needed for some of the really young, talented players that we have.
What do you think you learned from that playoff loss to Miami at Kyle Field?
Elko: Just that we continue to climb the ladder and knock on the door. I think one of the things that gets lost is for us to become the program everyone wants to talk about us being, we’re going to actually have to take these incremental steps and grow and get there, and I think people lose sight of the fact that we haven’t been in the playoffs before. We haven’t been in those moments knocking down the door, and you see it across sports for years. Some teams find ways to sneak in. Certainly Indiana did, but a lot of times what it takes is is this consistently getting to the spot to ultimately learn what it takes to get over the top, and so I think our kids are learning every year how to get into those moments down the stretch, how to play those moments the right way, how to elevate at the right time. It was a defensive slugfest that day, and certainly could have gone either way. And unfortunately, they made a couple more plays than we did, and find a way to come away with the win.
Miami wide receiver Malachi Toney (10) runs past a host of Texas A&M defenders for an 11-yard touchdown run during the second half of a first round College Football Playoff game in College Station, Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025.
Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle
There is some impatience in college football to succeed quickly. Are we making that up? It feels like things get tight if you don’t get better quickly and right away.
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Elko: I mean, we certainly attacked it that way. When you take a job now, I’ve said this at Duke when I got there, and I said this at A&M when I got there. We’re certainly not trying to build a house for someone else to live in down the road, right? You always have to kind of look at it from two lenses. We got to make sure we have a competitive roster every single year so that we can go out and show things on the field that get people excited about the direction of the program. But while that’s happening, you also have to make sure that you’re building this really, really strong foundation internally, so that success becomes sustainable. And I think that’s probably what we’ve tried and harped on the most in our building is we’ve had to be a little bit portal-heavy at times as we’re just kind of evolving, but we’ve continued to bring in 26-member high school classes every year. Recruiting high school talent is still a big part of what we’re doing. We’re still going out and continuing to attract elite talent, and that’s the balance, right? Is making sure that we’re building for the future while making sure that we have success in the present as well.
When this new era of college football happened, did you expect it to be like this? Did it kind of surprise you how things have gone, from portal to the way you have to grab talent?
Elko:Â I don’t think it was surprising to me. I think what you did was for years, I always equate it to the NFL because that’s what people identify with the most, all we ever had was the draft, and so you did your draft, and those kids had to play, and they had to be good enough. And if they weren’t, you were in trouble because you weren’t going to get another five years to get another cycle in there. But we never had free agency. We never had that portal window, and as the portal has evolved and grown over the years, you have to be adaptable to put your roster together the best possible way you can. And in some years, you don’t need it, right? In some years, you have enough homegrown talent, and you can rely on what you have. In some years, you know, you lose seven NFL linemen. Having the ability to go attract a couple veteran free agents to fill those holes is is really, really important.
How much do you balance your time of making sure your guys are happy and want to stay at A&M, finding potential talent available on other teams, high school recruiting and rallying the fan base for NIL contributions?
Elko:Â Yeah, you got to do it all. You just described the job, so there’s not one part of that you can slack on. I think what we really believe in is we want to build homegrown talent. We want to recruit and develop players, and we want to recruit and develop the best players in the country. And we want to use the portal to fill holes. And so we don’t really necessarily look at the portal as saying like, “Okay, hey, we could go get a better, we’ve got this running back coming back, and he’s been really good, but this kid might be a little better.” That’s not the program that we’re trying to be. I think sometimes, again, you have glaring holes at a position, and you’ve got this young kid who doesn’t have any experience, and you want to give him a shot, but you want him to have to compete and earn it, and so you can go pull in this older kid, and you can create this really good internal competition, and so that to us is the balance there. But as you spoke, like without NIL, none of this happens, right? And there’s a salary cap in the NFL, and if one year the Cowboys don’t have the salary cap and they can’t pay players, it’s going to be hard to hold on to them. And so yeah, that’s got to be a piece of it as well.
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Everyone has a tough schedule in the SEC. Do you try and prepare your kids for talk like that or do you just have a “Let’s go win the games” mentality?
Elko:Â I think that’s the mentality, and I think it’s funny. I always joke about this. I’ve said this a lot this offseason. I heard the same stuff last year. Last year going into the year, we had to go to Notre Dame, we had to go to LSU, we had to go to Texas, we had to go to Missouri, and people were saying, “Whoa, you guys aren’t going to be able to to do all that, all those games are on the road,” and then at the end of it, it was, “You guys played a really easy schedule, and you didn’t play anyone.” So you know how that goes. It kind of is what it is. I think in this conference, you have to prepare to play on the road. Obviously this year we have some marquee games, but the thing that makes this conference unique is anytime you go on the road in this league, there’s noise challenges, there’s unbelievable environments, there’s crazy fan bases, and so I think just part of your offensive preparation in this conference is how are we going to play in some of these hostile environments we’re going to play in, and if we’re playing at the level we want to, a lot of these games are going to turn into night games, which is going to make it even more magnified. And so, I just think it’s a part of what it is to be an SEC team these days.
Texas A&M players run onto the field after defeating Notre Dame 41-40 in an NCAA football game Saturday, Sept. 13, 2025, in South Bend, Ind. (AP Photo/Paul Beaty)
Paul Beaty/AP
When you go into places like Notre Dame or LSU, do you allow yourself a moment to appreciate those environments as well?
Elko:Â Yeah, I think you just identify the opportunity you have to play in really meaningful games. And for a guy who has always taken football very seriously, but maybe was at some schools where those games weren’t quite as as meaningful, or the crowds weren’t quite as loud and large, you just kind of say like, “Wow, it’s really cool.” For a guy who’s always loved college football and kind of grew up a big college football fan. It’s certainly, you enjoy the moment of going into a top-10 shootout in South Bend, and those things are pretty cool.
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There’s this one game at the end of the year … the game against Texas has to mean more in some sense, right?
Elko:Â Yeah, there’s a balance that we have to strike, but it certainly isn’t lost on me what that game means, right? You have two premier programs in a state where football is everything. You have two programs that are also functioning at a really, really high level right now, which has added stakes to that game each year. It’s not lost on me on what that game means to us. So yeah, we put some extra preparation into it. We put some extra offseason film study into it. You’re always wanting to make sure you’re doing the absolute best you can for that game, knowing that 8-4 with a win in that game shouldn’t make a successful season, and 11-1 with a loss in that game shouldn’t make it a failure, right? And so that balance, we try to keep, but it certainly isn’t lost on me what that game means.