Josh Pate joins TexAgs Live in-studio as Elko & Co. prepare for spring ball

TexAgs Live is Pate State material! The college football analyst Josh Pate stopped by the TexAgs Live studio on Wednesday to discuss a handful of topics around the sport. He touched on top active head coaches, Texas A&M's first year under Mike Elko and much more.

Key notes from Josh Pate interview

• I'm not exactly plugged into the college basketball scene, but the conference tournament will come to me in Nashville, and from that point forward, I speak authoritatively on the sport like I've been watching it all year. That point is not here yet. Last night, I was in the gym and had the AirPods in, and I kind of glanced to see A&M was playing Auburn. I'm like, "Is it men's or women's? OK, it's men's. This is not a replay. It's live. Are they up double digits with less than five minutes left?" From that point, I was glued, and I could break down the last five minutes of the game. What a night that must have been last night.
   
• In today's college football, I would ask you what would happen if we take the Notre Dame team from this past year and turn the volume up offensively, like 15 percent? Every other element was there. What I noticed about Ohio State this year is there were times when they were extremely explosive. There were other times when you remembered, "Oh, they've got TreVeyon Henderson and Quinshon Judkins back there. The quarterback can fall forward for a first down if you need him to." That was Chip Kelly. That was a loaded talent roster, but that was also being multiple in their approach.
   
• Understand that the teams who can win three or four games in a College Football Playoff setting are probably ones who are B- or better in several categories instead of just A+ at one thing and then F elsewhere across the board. You have to be able to do several things at least decently because you're not coming up on one or two teams. You're coming up on three or four teams. They're all going to be some of the best in the country.
   
• We're all trained to look at any aspect of society in the past as an "era," and yet you never know what people called the era in what we've come to define as "the era." The skill is in understanding what is around the corner, and Mike Elko is really good at this. I would go as far as to say Texas A&M Athletics is, given the big deal they signed this past week, looking around the corner and having that 10th-floor perspective. If I'm casting a vision, you don't snap your fingers, and it happens. If it doesn't work out, we try something different the next day. If Elko snaps his fingers, it's a two-year process to thoroughly implement whatever you're talking about. If you don't have foresight, if you don't understand what "era" you're in, you're dead. You don't know it yet, but you're dead.
   
• Based on the intel I have right now on A&M, I think they backfilled really well. It sucked to end the season the way they did. If you do that, you don't want to do it like Lincoln Riley just did. You don't want to do it in your third year. You want to do it very early in your tenure. Kalen DeBoer is dealing with this at Alabama. The blessing in sucking down the stretch is there's no guesswork of what isn't the right way and what is the right way. He gets to walk down the halls with proof of performance or lack of proof of performance. This is the way we're going. This is who does and doesn't need to be here. We tried it this way, and it doesn't work. It's going to be my way or it's going to be no way moving forward.
   
• In this era, you cannot just come into a program and take over and do it the same way you would in 1978 because guys have options now that they didn't in 1978. If you come in late in a cycle, you have to handle the situation with kid gloves a little bit in the first go-round. When you're in the second, third or fourth year, guys have had several portal cycles where they could have left. The guys left at this point, those are your guys. They've chosen to stay there. The way last year ended, if you want to draw a positive on a negative, that's the positive draw.
   
• Here's what tricked you: If you watched the NFL, what works works and what doesn't work, doesn't work. You are playing a pro team every week. In college, you can get fooled because if you are at a top-15 program, therefore you are recruiting at a top-15 level, you will outclass 80 percent of the teams you play. Unless you turn the ball over a lot, you can afford to play almost any style you want, and to varying degrees, you are going to win. That's not what determines college football. You pride yourself on recruiting big humans, and that's one of the talking points.
   
• To your point, when people think of Steve Sarkisian, and whether they are right or not, they think about pushing the ball down the field, and yet all he's over there talking about is Texas having to be able to convert tough yards on the ground. Not every coach mentions that first out of their mouth, but the ones who are going to be there at the end all of them are talking about that.
   
• Ohio State is the perfect example. Jeremiah Smith goes off one week. He went off against Oregon. I think he had one catch for three yards against Texas, but they won both games. They just won them in different ways, which is what we are talking about here. The profile of the teams that are going to the final four or final two or be national champs are going to be ones that didn't win one way. They’re the teams that won in four or five different ways.
   
• Brian Kelly being a top-10 resume can be debated. He wouldn't be one of my first 10 hires. If you are asking about current output, I think he would be fringe at best. Probably 10-15 range, maybe. Or maybe the 8-15 range. What LSU screwed up around there is the defensive side of hiring. It's the same thing Riley is dealing with at USC. I think they made the right moves. The problem is, are you afforded the patience at LSU or USC to start making what should have been Day 1 moves four years in? If the answer is yes, that means they are willing to give you some grace for two years. I don't know that year three, year four, year five grace is something that they are interested in.
   
• Last week, I said something that I did not think was debatable. Nick Saban is not around anymore. Mack Brown was another national championship winner. He is gone. We only have three active head coaches who have won championships. We only have eight active head coaches that have won a playoff game. I said Kelly has a top-10 resume, and everyone pushed back because he hasn't won the big one. OK, he hasn't won a playoff game or a national title. If that is your barometer, find me 10 others who fit that criteria. Going 9-3 with three blowouts is a lot different than one-possession losses.
   
• The one thing that I think factors in here is if you go into a place like LSU, it is no different then Kyle Field. If you come in and embrace it, you build so much equity immediately. Kelly did not do that. He wiped the building clean of Louisiana flavor. As long as you are all in immediately, it won't matter. You cannot come in, wipe a place clean and not get the job done because that is when people go back to the bank of, “How much do I like this guy?” You said he is not on the hot seat. I agree.
   
• If Dabo Swinney won a title this year, it would be a crazy story, but it would be another title for him. If Kelly won it, it would be transformative. Swinney's resume is so good that I think if we were to be asked to describe Clemson and Swinney, in a few words, we would do some form of: “They are regressing a little bit, but they are still the best in their conference.” They are still recruiting at a top-15 average level.
   
• Topics tackling with Elko when we were here for Missouri: I got in early on a Friday and went to talk to him in his office. I always love asking this: How much of your program and fingerprint can you implement in one year? The answer is never 100 percent. Nobody tells me that, and he did not either. You get paid more money, so people think that speeds up what reality is, and it doesn't. The way A&M ended the season was terrible. What I perceived when we came in for the Missouri game, after they blew them out, no one was looking, and then they lost when everyone was looking. Is that coincidence or is that something psychologically you can learn from that? What I love to do with those guys is I love to toss something out to those guys like a softball, and I prefer not to do Q&A stuff. See where they go with it.
   
• I don't know if Keelon Russell is going to start for Alabama. If he does, it is because he is a star. That is an off-the-radar player in the SEC. The off-the-radar team is Florida. They have top-15 national title odds, and their over-under win total is 6.5. They play an insane schedule. Another one is Oklahoma.