Josh Pate shares takeaways from sit-down with A&M's Mike Elko

After a one-on-one sit-down with Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko, college football analyst Josh Pate joined Tuesday's edition of TexAgs Live to share his thoughts on his recent conversation with Elko as well as talks with several other Power Four coaches. 

Key notes from Josh Pate interview

• My interview with Mike Elko was really good. He was open and brutally honest. You guys know how he is. Elko is the kind of guy where, if you ask him some things, he'll just shoot straight with you. The point is, you're going to have to be the one to ask him because I don't take him as someone who is going to run around trying to throw 37 different excuses out in the national media or the local media. If there's a reality about a situation, it's a reality. 
   
• I've always been fascinated with the recruiting rankings, on average for the last 10 years for Texas A&M, and then the NFL Draft output for the last 10 years. I asked him about that, and he didn't duck it or look down at a PR sheet to try and answer it in a sanitized way. He just shot straight about it, which I respect. He shot straight about their defensive struggles towards the end of last year and what it's like untangling the knots in this program.
   
• I think a lot of times when a new head coach takes over a job it's normally because the guy before him got fired, which was the case here. The fan's mind sometimes thinks of that as, "OK, as soon as that guy got fired, everything got wiped clean.” It's like a forest that got torched, and now, the new guy comes in, and he starts to plant the seeds, and we'll see how fast it grows. Well, that's not reality. The reality is, in a lot of cases, you have to come in and clean out a lot of crap. You have a lot of destructing to do before you can start constructing what you want.
   
• The funny thing about football is they don't give you two years to do it. You're going to be in a season every fall, and you're going to be in the process of doing one and trying to do the other at the same time. If he was getting paid $60,000 a year, people would have some empathy for him, but he's not. When you get paid several million dollars per year, people don't really feel sorry for you. Not that he's asking for it, nor am I asking for it for him. I think sometimes the ability to understand and appreciate that just gets tossed out the window. Logically, that's never made sense to me. Realistically, I get why it's that way.
   
• The interview was really good. We sat and talked with him for a while after it ended. It is one thing to listen to him as opposed to some coaches out there about their approach to taking over a program during the portal era. A lot of guys handle their business really scared of the portal. He does not. If he didn't do it in year one, he won't do it at any point moving forward. Year one is when you're the most prone to doing that because you're scared half your roster will leave, and you can't field a team in the fall. On a number of fronts, I felt like it was very eye-opening, but not just for an A&M fan. If you're a Washington fan or a USC fan watching that, I thought it would be fascinating.
   
• Scott Frost at Nebraska is what I call being in the realm of explainability. That guy was losing one-possession games every week. Every week, everybody was trashing Frost because they just lost 23-20 again. If I'm going to accept that he coached this team well enough to be in a position to lineup for the game-tying field goal in the fourth quarter, I can't believe or imagine that he coached the kicker to shank it wide left. Is that really what makes the difference between a bad coach and a good coach? The problem is, in one game, no, that's not what makes the difference.
   
• When you stack, stack, stack, and it keeps going against you... Then, there's the other school of thought where you think Frost could have coached them well enough to be up 34-23, and it's irrelevant. You're just assuming as the baseline that every game has to be close. They don't all have to be close.
   
• With Jimbo Fisher, you can take different circumstances but apply the same logic. If we think about this as mathematicians, and we remove all of the humans and emotion from it, and we say, "Let's keep Fisher at A&M. Let the future play out as it will have played out. Let's simulate 100 seasons in College Station." Does he win the conference eventually? Yeah, probably. Does he make the College Football Playoff? Yeah, he does several times, but was the average output good enough? The answer was no. It wasn't good enough.
   
• I used to always think of year two as the year that you start to see "it." It's always been transitioned based on year one when you take over a program. In this era, I talked with Elko last week a lot about Kalen DeBoer because they both took over programs at the same time. DeBoer is taking over for a guy who steps away and retires, and Elko is taking over for Fisher.
   
• It's kind of the same things in play there in the sense that in year one, you're dealing with something that no one has ever had to deal with before in the history of coaching this sport. That is knowing that after your first winter conditioning session and your first spring practice, there is an exit door, penalty-free, that your entire roster could walk out of.
   
• In year two, your roster has had three exit doors. By year two, everybody on the team actually wants to be on the team and actually wants to play for you. You start to infuse your freshmen class, but more importantly, you start to infuse your first sprinkling of portal guys. You've either confirmed or shot down the notion that you hired the right staff right out of the gate. You've got a good lay of the land, and you've got a good feel for how the league reacts to you. The portal thing is so unique because it used to just be that your roster would be your roster. You can't assume that anymore now. Now, year two moving on, your roster actually is your roster.
   
• I wholeheartedly believe in a smaller school receiving a kickback if its starting quarterback goes to a much bigger school. I don't know how realistic it is. I've talked to a bunch of coaches about that. It will not shock you to learn that every Group of Five coach is for that. I was surprised that a lot of the Power Four coaches were for it, and they are the ones who would be paying the money in most cases.
   
• What I've found is a lot of those guys hate doing that. They do it because they have to. It's kill or be killed, basically. A lot of those Power Four coaches look, and they say, "First off, most of us were Group of Five coaches at some point. You're just a victim of circumstance at that point." The bigger schools know what will happen, and they know they'll always have the money anyway, so they'd love to kick money down to them. I've received that feedback from a number of guys.
   
• It's happening in a revenue-sharing era, where you're incentivized as a player to stay on a roster. If I know I'm playing with Texas A&M, and I get a certain amount as a freshman, but if I'm still there as a junior, I get an elevated amount because I stayed here three years. If you combine that with those two concepts, think about what that does for roster continuity. If you know you have to pay money to get a guy from somewhere else, plus the guys already on your roster know that they'll make more money the longer they stay there. You did not outlaw transfers. You never made it illegal. Guys are free to do whatever they want to. At least there's an incentive on both sides of the pendulum for guys to stay put.
   
• I was accused of allowing my visit to College Station to influence my selection of Texas as the most hated team in college football. Unbeknownst to the audience, I did make it my list, but all I did was compile audience feedback nationally. The audience feedback was fairly overwhelming. It was Texas at No.1 and Alabama at No. 2. I think Miami was No. 3, and then a combination of Ohio State and Michigan at No. 4 and No. 5.
   
• Very surprised that Notre Dame was not one of the top five, but I see the reasons. Georgia is just fascinating because, to me, they have been the top program for a while. Yet, we ran a poll and got like 10,000 to 15,000 votes on it. "Is Georgia a top-five most hated team?" It was 51 percent “yes” and 49 percent “no.” It was split down the middle. The entire country can't decide whether they hate Georgia or not.
   
• With Texas, they were No. 1, and I got accused of allowing you guys to rub off on me. The other bit of feedback was how can a team that hasn't won a national championship in a couple of decades be hated? I'm not sure if you follow college football you ask that question. Most of the people who don't follow it or only casually follow it are the only ones who would ask that. If you haven't won a title but you act like you've won a title, that's it. That's not the only fanbase that's ever acted like that. To their credit, I have no problem with it. Be your authentic selves. I feel the same way about A&M.
   
• When I was in a classroom there the week of the Missouri game, one of the young ladies there, when we did Q&A, raised her hand, and we called on her. She asked, "Why does everyone else hate A&M so much?" In fairness, I gave a little cookie-cutter answer. She did not relinquish the mic, she goes, "Yeah, but for real, why do they hate us?" I said, "Well, because A&M has different traditions than everyone else. There's a different vibe around Texas A&M than everywhere else. They don't get it. Now, you guys here get it. You can spend all of your time worrying about explaining yourself to the outside world, or you can forget about what the outside world thinks about you, and just be you."
   
• That's college football. That's tradition. At Texas, they just have a different version of it than you. They act the way they act. You act the way you act, and we decide who to hate and who to love. On Saturdays, there's nothing wrong with it.
   
• I was really fascinated to find that the 18-34-year-old crowd doesn't have that disdain in their chest for Notre Dame that the older crowd has. I think that comes from not being scared that they'll ever win a title in their lifetime. Only this past year have you ever really felt like they were going to challenge for it, which is wild because they played for a title in 2012, they made the playoffs two other times, and they've been a consistently solid program, but it's never been that shark fin that scares you. If I tell you you're in the water with a great white, you're terrified. If I tell you you're in the water with a nurse shark, you still don't want to be there, but you're not knocking kids out of the way to get out of the ocean.
   
• I don't know if the national perception is where it needs to be for Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss. The first thing people think of with Kiffin is anything other than his win-loss record. Then, when you get to the win-loss record, I don't think people properly appreciate how solid he has been. Because of that, they need to make the playoffs this year. The schedule makers did them a favor. They have a ton of production to replace, but they've been doing it. They're extremely excited about Austin Simmons, the quarterback there. They're not trying to hype him up where it could go bust, but internally, they think he's the real deal. I rarely see a guy not pan out at that position under Kiffin. That Kentucky game needs to be as much fuel as any doubter or preseason ranking out there. The fact that Kentucky came in there and ripped a playoff spot out of your arms ought to have them with tension in their shoulders all year. Does that program have that attitude? That's what you have to find out.