COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Mike Elko’s closet holds not just his clothes but his memories, too.
And they serve as a reminder that the Texas A&M head coach has taken a route unlike any other to get to this job. He started his career by zigging and zagging through every small school in New England, from Stony Brook, Penn and the Merchant Marine Academy to Fordham and Hofstra. He coached defenses under Dave Clawson at four different schools: Fordham, Richmond, Bowling Green and Wake Forest. Then came the big boys — defensive coordinator gigs at Notre Dame and Texas A&M that paved the way for head-coaching opportunities, first at Duke and now here with the Aggies.
Elko has souvenirs from each stop. He made sure to hang onto a handful of clothing items each time he’s made a move. From more recent stints, he’s also kept mini helmets and a few footballs.
“There’s a little part of my closet that is just kind of a shrine to where I’ve been,” Elko said.
Well, kind of. It’s not all-encompassing this week. The Notre Dame gear got put away — outside of the house — Elko said, laughing.
Saturday marks his first return to South Bend since leaving the Irish after the conclusion of the 2017 season. Elko has faced Notre Dame twice as a head coach, including last year’s much-hyped season-opener, but never in the shadow of Touchdown Jesus. Until Saturday, when his 16th-ranked Aggies take on the eighth-ranked Fighting Irish in primetime on NBC.
Elko doesn’t expect any heightened emotions with the return to South Bend, but it’s hard not to view the trip as something of a full-circle moment for a coach with a one-of-a-kind career path — and the stop that changed its trajectory for good.
The pitch from then-Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly was straightforward. It’s Notre Dame.
“It didn’t take a whole lot,” Elko said. “It was my opportunity to get onto that big stage, and it really kind of started the track that I’ve gone on that ultimately wound me up here as the head coach.”
He believes that because prior to those stints at Notre Dame and Texas A&M, he’d never coached a roster filled with former four- and five-star recruits and the pick of the litter from the transfer portal. Elko had never been at a school that had the most talented roster in its conference. He’d always had to squeeze the most out of what he had, the sum greater than the parts on paper. This is what Elko means when he talks about maximizing whatever he’s got and finding ways to do it efficiently. The Ivy League grad uses analytics and situational football to give his teams every possible edge.
And he did all of that before he got to Notre Dame. In South Bend, he got to put his mind (and defensive schemes) to work with one of the most talented rosters in the country. Same thing happened here under Jimbo Fisher.
“To get to this part in my career,” Elko said as he walked a few hundred yards from Kyle Field, “I had to go experience Notre Dame. I had to experience Texas A&M as a defensive coordinator. I had to get a feel for what that level of football really was all about.”
Those roles also put Elko on the map in the way he’d never been before. He righted the ship after a disastrous final season under his Notre Dame predecessor, Brian VanGorder, who was fired after four games that saw the Irish give up 456 yards of offense per game and rank among the worst teams in the nation in total defense. Elko’s year at Notre Dame began a remarkable yearslong run of tremendous defenses, which helped pave the way for Marcus Freeman to become the Irish head coach.
When Elko arrives in South Bend this weekend, he’ll know he’s a very different coach than he was when he first showed up in December 2016. He’s a head coach in the SEC with a team he hopes can make some noise in both SEC play and nationally. The Aggies, rather famously, expect to win big — but they haven’t finished a season with double-digit wins since 2012. They haven’t come close to sniffing the College Football Playoff since its inception in 2014.
Perhaps this is the season where it all comes together for Texas A&M. Maybe Elko is the right coach to help this program break through. He’s using all the lessons he learned at all those stops at every level of college football to now try to make a program with incredible talent and seemingly limitless resources become its most successful version.
“I’ve had to learn how to function at 100 percent efficiency,” Elko said. “Any organization, regardless of what their ceiling is — that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to make it maximize whatever it’s possible of being. I draw back a lot to what we did at Bowling Green, what we did at Wake Forest and how we elevated those programs and made them what they became.
“If we can do that here at Texas A&M, I think this place can be really special.”
