COLLEGE STATION, Texas — As Mike Elko coached his first game as a college football defensive coordinator, he wasn’t sure he’d make it to the second game.
The U.S. Merchant Marine Academy — with a 23-year-old Elko making his debut as the Division III program’s DC — trailed Muhlenberg 42-0 at halftime on Sept. 1, 2001. Amid the relative silence of the hundreds of home fans in attendance, Elko thought about a lot of things. The long season ahead. How the team couldn’t let one half of football define it. Internally, he asked himself, What the hell am I doing?
More than anything, he focused on how to fix it.
For the next two quarters, the Mariners didn’t allow a point. “I did make some good halftime adjustments,” he joked recently, recalling the 42-17 loss.
Elko kept his job. The next week, the Mariners shut out Norwich 37-0.
Ever since that baptism, Elko, now the 47-year-old head coach at Texas A&M, has shown a knack for helping turn programs around. The Aggies saw his talent firsthand in his four-year stint as their defensive coordinator, then in his first head coaching gig the last two years at Duke. Now they hope he can right the ship in College Station after the program’s failed experiment of ceding progressively more money and power to Jimbo Fisher.
Although Elko served as Fisher’s defensive coordinator for four seasons, the contrast within the program under the two coaches is plain to see to those in and around it. When Elko makes his A&M debut on Saturday night as the Aggies host Notre Dame at Kyle Field, it will cap nine months of work spent shifting the program from the overexposed underachiever it was into the disciplined, efficient winner he hopes it can be.
“Everything has taken shape pretty much exactly as was projected and laid out by Coach (Elko),” offensive coordinator Collin Klein said. “His vision and consistency is extraordinary.”
When Elko held his first team meeting as Texas A&M’s head coach on Nov. 27, he got an early indication of just how much work needed to be done.
“It was very loose in terms of people getting there on time,” he said, estimating that 20 percent of the team was late.
In the two years Elko was at Duke, the culture at A&M deteriorated. Multiple people within Fisher’s program described poor day-to-day discipline and accountability in 2022 and ‘23, with one of his former assistants saying, “It was kids doing whatever they wanted.”
Under Elko, being on time for meetings, workouts and class is non-negotiable. He had the same expectation at Duke, where players quickly adapted. Those who showed up late to his first A&M meeting weren’t allowed in. By the next team meeting, players got the message. Elko said the percentage of late arrivers was zero.
But Elko’s approach is not a militaristic one. To him, it’s a simple matter of respect.
Take team picture day as an example. In recent years, it wasn’t unusual for the event to run behind schedule. This year, every member of the team was seated on a bleacher at 2:30 p.m. on a mid-August afternoon, and the team was in and out within 10 minutes.
“The kid that shows up late to picture day is basically saying his time is more important than the 119 other people who are sitting out there baking in the sun,” Elko said. “When you word it to people in those ways, it just makes sense.”
The point is not only to prepare his team for success but to prepare his players for the future. Many of them hope to play at the next level. “You can’t just stroll into the NFL building seven minutes late,” he said.
After the initial hiccup, the players have responded positively to the program’s structure.
“There’s a lot of attention to detail, from the little things you do to the big things,” linebacker Scooby Williams said. “I feel like it’s kind of like NFL-ran. It’s kind of professional.”
Even when Elko was A&M’s defensive coordinator, he maintained that type of organization and structure. A former athletic department staffer told The Athletic last year that when Elko was at A&M as an assistant, “it was like two different operations going on at the same time,” comparing Elko’s defense to a professional outfit.
“They ran it the right way, they did a good job with the kids, it was a good environment,” the former staffer said of the defense. “It looked and sounded completely different from the offensive side of the field, which was dysfunctional in many ways.”
Elko has also emphasized bonding within the roster. During team meals, players are expected to avoid scrolling on their phone so they can spend time talking to each other.
“It’s not about ‘Mike Elko said put your cell phone away,’” he said. “You’re on your own in college for a large part of the day. You’re with your teammates at a meal for 25 minutes. You’re going to be on your phone tonight for four hours. It’s just the reality. So for those 25 minutes, why not just put it down and talk about something? Because that’s a life skill that you’re developing.”
It has had its intended effect. Quarterback Conner Weigman said teammates have prioritized holding offseason bonding events, from bowling to BigShots Golf.
And within that structure, there’s freedom. Elko said he doesn’t care what players wear. There’s no rules around earrings or clothing. Players can have fun at practice, celebrate, play music in team meetings. Anything to make the tough, physical sport enjoyable.
“He doesn’t ask them to do things that don’t matter to success,” said defensive coordinator Jay Bateman, who also worked with Elko in 2004 at Richmond. “I think kids appreciate that.”
In the last 20 years of his career, Elko has become an expert in Year 1.
Seven of his last eight job changes have brought him into a program in the first year of a coaching regime. The only time he was hired to join an incumbent coaching staff was at Notre Dame in 2017, when he entered midway through the Brian Kelly era, turned the defense around in one season and then joined Fisher at A&M the following year.
At Richmond and Hofstra, Year 2 was when the big jumps were made. Bowling Green and Wake Forest were slower builds. Under Dave Clawson, whom he worked for at Richmond, Bowling Green and Wake, Elko learned how to construct a solid foundation. It often involved redshirts and patience.
But during his first go-round at Texas A&M in 2018, there was no time for either. Fisher was given a 10-year, $75 million contract after the school fired predecessor Kevin Sumlin, who had gone 51-26.
“You’ve got to come in here and you’ve got to win now,” Elko said.
The Aggies experienced some Year 1 success, going 9-4 in 2018. By Fisher’s third year, they were in College Football Playoff contention. When Elko went to Duke in 2022, he took Clawson’s foundational approach and mixed in some of the urgency he operated with at Notre Dame and A&M.
“I’m inheriting juniors and seniors on a roster that do not want to hear me talking about the future,” Elko said. If he did, and they believed he didn’t want them, they could easily leave through the transfer portal.
So he and his staff put immense effort into making it as good as they could as quickly as possible.
That formula is replicable in Aggieland. Although Texas A&M did lose some key players in the portal after Fisher’s departure, like defensive lineman Walter Nolen (Ole Miss) and receiver Evan Stewart (Oregon), there is still substantial talent on hand, like Weigman and defensive lineman Shemar Turner. And Elko’s staff added quality talent to the roster, like former Big Ten sack leader Nic Scourton and multi-year offensive line starter Ar’maj Reed-Adams.
Could a consistent, disciplined approach applied to a roster with top-15 talent create a dark horse Playoff contender in the first year of the 12-team format?
Elko won’t make predictions, but he knows what he wants to see.
“My hope is that we learn how to play the game to the level we’re capable of,” he said. “If we can learn what really matters in terms of how to be successful in the game of football, which I think is very similar to how to be successful in the game of life, if we can truly learn that and let that show up on the field the right way, I think we have enough talent to be a really, really good football team.
“But doing it the right way will ultimately be what drives our success — or doesn’t — this year.”
As he did 23 years ago as a third-year coach in Division III, Elko is just trying to fix things. He’s done it before.
Following the first-half debacle against Muhlenberg, Elko’s Merchant Marine defense allowed just 19 points per game for the rest of the 2001 season. In their season finale, the Mariners beat the Coast Guard Academy. Final score: 7-3.
Elko said he never doubted himself but joked that the Mariners “deserved a lot better than a 23-year-old defensive coordinator who was figuring it all out at the time.”
Among the lessons he learned in that defensive coordinator debut? The margins are never as big as they seem when you need to turn around the momentum.
“So you just try to focus on how to fix those problems,” he said. “And I think we were able to do that.”
(Photo courtesy of Texas A&M Athletics)