Josh Pate explains why he trusts Mike Elko in new era of college athletics

We are just under three weeks away from 2025 SEC Media Days in Atlanta. College football analyst Josh Pate joined Tuesday's edition of TexAgs Live for some offseason chatter, including discussion about the leadership at Texas A&M as a new era is upon us.

Key notes from Josh Pate interview

• I have the countdown on my phone. Do you count down to SEC Media Days or kickoff?
   
• You have to figure out, as a fan, how serious you are. If you’re a more passive fan, SEC Media Days don’t matter to you, so you count down to kickoff. I remember growing up…I’ve been in the “tier one” category for a long time. I know the media lineup by now. If I’m in high school or middle school, I know who’s speaking at 9 a.m. on Wednesday of Media Days. That’s how chomping at the bit I used to be.
   
• This is never going to affect football like it’s affected baseball. The entire phenomenon of the Savannah Bananas, I believe, was born through highlight culture, starting with SportsCenter and evolving into social media highlight culture. That equals not watching a three-hour baseball game that’s game 101 of 162 when you can watch the highlights. Then a whole generation grows up on highlights, and that’s their entire impression of baseball. Someone who is business-minded sees that it is an entire generation’s idea of baseball. You add some elements of pro-wrestling, Harlem Globetrotters, and, if that’s what clicks, they want to try this concept out. Now, they’re selling out football stadiums to play a version of baseball that would not have been able to exist 25 or 30 years ago. I’m not saying it’s a good or bad thing, it’s just a thing. It really has affected baseball.
   
• Here’s what else you have to guard against. I did it the other day, ironically, during the College World Series elimination game. I was not watching that live. I was leaving church, had gone to the gym and was about to go to the office to do the show. I was leaving the gym, and ten minutes prior, the ejection had all happened. Since I feel strongly about that topic, I felt moved to make a statement. I saw little snippets, but not the entire lead-up to it. I won’t lie and say I had watched every pitch prior to the incident. I was driving into the office and thought, “You hypocrite. You haven’t even been watching that full game, and you just commented on it. That’s the same thing you get mad at other people for doing.” I explained it away as you just do whatever you want in baseball. I don’t want blame. I just want credit.
   
• My stance hasn’t changed. The umpire’s name was Angel, and I’ve never known a good umpire with that name. Secondly, I felt pretty confident in the people saying things. There are people I respect, and if five of them are in agreement about a strongly held sports opinion, I can pretty much guarantee I will agree with them. I won’t agree with them all the time on everything, but if they all have a visceral reaction in unison, I’ll probably agree with that. I’ve long had a problem in sports, especially baseball, with the “god complex” that umpires get. I think it bleeds down from the major league level since that’s the strongest union for officials in any sport. They always carry themselves as “untouchable.” I have always thought that it’s weird that multiple major league umpires have nicknames. “Cowboy Joe West” is behind the plate tonight. Why would an umpire ever have a nickname? Because they’re all around for fifty years, because you can’t get rid of them, and they make sure they’re part of the show. That bleeds down into the college ranks, and it culminates in an elimination game disagreement on balls and strikes, and you’re out of here. Why? “It’s the College World Series for me, too. You can’t question me.” So no, I don’t regret a thing I said.
   
• The SEC is the most dominant conference in collegiate athletics. It has been for a while and continues to be. A lot of people talking about that topic are solely referencing football. They’ll talk about athletics at large, but they’re talking about football. I come at that from the angle of not hearing basketball people talk about that all that much. When it comes to NCAA Tournament time, you may hear people talking about how many bids a league deserves, but that’s very seasonal. I don’t hear many college hoops fans pounding their chests in September about conference superiority. That’s mainly the world of football. I say that to say, if the SEC doesn’t win the national title in football this year, people will tell you none of that stuff matters. In relation to football, it doesn’t, but just say football and don’t speak in totality. Because David Nuño is going to throw 37 things in your face accurately, and you’re going to duck like the guy in the matrix and ask about football again and say you guys suck. By what standard? Oh, the SEC’s previous standard. That’s pretty convenient to judge the conference against the rest of the conference and a standard no one has come close to touching in the history of the game.
   
• The short answer to the question of A&M positioning themselves to be above other programs is, “Yes, probably.” You’ve probably embarked on an era that is uniquely shaped for Texas A&M to weaponize what they are. They have many layers in the identity of the program and culture overall that could make it a monster. It wouldn’t matter if you don’t have the right coach. So, the first thing they did to place them above is hire Mike Elko. Hire a guy where you don’t have to depend on out-resourcing everyone. That’s not what you’re depending on. You just need to be even. Make sure no one is far ahead of you. If you look left and right and see who you’re competing against, you trust internally that you can out-develop, out-evaluate and out-execute them more times than not on game day. That’s what I trust about Elko. I remember the overwhelming feedback I got from people who faced him at Duke. It was a short time, but they said it was amazing that everyone was talking about Kalen DeBoer at Alabama, and no one was paying attention to Elko. You wait for the evaluation and development pieces, and for NIL and spending to settle down, and it will circle around to the things that matter the most, like developing guys. If all else is equal, that’s why I trust Trev Alberts. Everything else works downstream from that.
   
• The Will Howard situation is something I could see playing out again this year. In this portal era, you see a lot of movement in the quarterback position. You see more second or third-stop guys. As an unintended consequence, it measures staffs against each other. If I watch Howard play for you for three years, then he comes to me and he’s 20 percent better, what does it say about you? Speaking generically, what if Carson Beck is lights out at Miami this year? I don’t know what that says about Georgia. Fast-forward five years down the road, everything about your roster would be crystal clear. By five years, either your results, the NFL draft, NFL production or a combination of all of it, will tell you what you had on your roster five years ago. We don’t have a crystal ball. What amazes me is looking at teams that win and hitting the fast forward button five years. You realize they were doing it without a future All-Pro at this or that position, especially quarterback. That’s the most underwritten, impressive part of this sport to me. Everyone looks at a winner as a winner. All due respect to Joe Burrow and 2019 LSU. What if you rewind a few years, and you had Jake Coker at quarterback, and you won? The trophy looks the same, but it’s a different story. I wonder what 2030 Texas A&M will say about this team.
   
• I looked at the FanDuel odds and excluded the top five teams. How deep is this league of teams that, if everything goes right, could win it? It’s hard to do this “Apples to Apples” because no one plays the same schedule, but Oklahoma is one. I think they are viewed as a bad team trying to rebound, but I think it’s a bad quarterback and offensive coordinator situation trying to rebound. Neither is good, but the ladder is easier to fix if you get a better combination there, which I think they did.
   
• If we look at Auburn, every spring and summer, there is a propensity to look at the past year and find the team with a terrible turnover margin. Then you say, if that team just flips that margin and nothing else, then they’ll be good this year, which is true. But sometimes, the turnover margin is not merely luck. With Auburn last year, I watched some of their games last year in preparation for talking about them for the next few months. They had a skill in turning the ball over. It wasn’t unlucky. You bring in turnover-prone Jackson Arnold, a former five-star and plug him into an offense that historically has had a high turnover rate even when they’re working. But, if somehow it just works there, they have the talent roster to give them a puncher’s chance to win the SEC.
   
• If A&M plays the style they are looking to play, there is less variance in the outcome. If the ground game and defensive elevation are what they are supposed to be, there should not be wild differences in results and outcomes. You will have a lot of close games, so more than turnover margin, the one-possession game outcome margin, is the difference in being plus-three and minus-three in that category, is playing in Atlanta or being 8-4, 7-5.
   
• I trust the sum of incremental additions and progress. There is no one guy who will go to a Thorpe Award winner from nearly being benched. I’m counting on the collective performing a little better per position group than they did last year. It’s not something the eyes can see. You get off the field on third down a few times and find yourself leading 17-6 at halftime, and you think, this is not the way it would have been. That is the Elko effect if it plays out that way.
   
• I’m iffy on Missouri because I don’t blindly trust that they answered the quarterback question. I do trust that if Beau Pribula is going to be a good quarterback, he’s in a good spot. It’s not me doubting. It’s me questioning.
   
• South Carolina, people are talking about them like it’s a one-man deal. If it was LaNorris Sellers vs. … I’d have them as a national title contender. It’s the same thing as Missouri. It’s me questioning how deep they are going to be at receiver? Is their tailback situation settled? So many guys defensively they sent into the NFL Draft. History tells me I cannot blindly trust South Carolina to backfill like Georgia or Ohio State. A large amount of the college football public is talking about South Carolina like it is assumed, and I don’t assume things.