Aggy 2024: Still waiting on the Looch 44

[billfromlaketravis 11,516]

So if the next guy loses to Texas this time next year, does he immediately go on the hot seat? Given their long history, I’d say yes. 
 

Firing Jimbo was the right move, but from a financial prospective, Bjork should have kept him another year. If Jimbo lost to Texas next year, red ass grandmas would be signing their social security checks over to aggy to fund the buyout. They’d raise the money in record time. 

[The Dog 44,062]

9 minutes ago, billfromlaketravis said:

So if the next guy loses to Texas this time next year, does he immediately go on the hot seat?

Absolutely 

[Tree Fidy 1,174]

47 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

I've seen that a million times.  I suppose that I'm the only one that has no idea of the original movie it's from.

You’ve never seen A Star is Born?

[C-Man 27,230]

47 minutes ago, RomaVicta said:

American Hustle. Good Great flick.

FIFY

[Nueces River Rat 5,539]

2 hours ago, TexasRenegade said:

Bjork is in over his head.  This whole coaching change is giving him enough rope to hang himself so they can replace him.

 

The press conference fiasco when he found out we were moving to SEC was setup for him to embarrass himself.

Which begs the question about John Sharp….   Why hasn’t he been asked to retire or else?    He signed off on all of Jimbos deals and even said  it was too bad it wasn’t a 15 year deal.   I know he was only joking about that, but still he was all in on the 10 year extension.   

[TexasRenegade 2,449]

11 minutes ago, Nueces River Rat said:

Which begs the question about John Sharp….   Why hasn’t he been asked to retire or else?    He signed off on all of Jimbos deals and even said  it was too bad it wasn’t a 15 year deal.   I know he was only joking about that, but still he was all in on the 10 year extension.   

Because Sharp plays the legislature like a fiddle and largely gets whatever appropriations or anything else he asks for.

 

Football may get the mob stirred up, but as long as Sharp is batting 1.000 on key appropriations a&m wants or doesn't want happening, his job is safe.

[ousux 5,597]

Which begs the question about John Sharp….   Why hasn’t he been asked to retire or else?    He signed off on all of Jimbos deals and even said  it was too bad it wasn’t a 15 year deal.   I know he was only joking about that, but still he was all in on the 10 year extension.   

Who else is going to be willing to launder state disaster relief money and funnel it to their next savior head corch?

[Tex Pete 20,399]

28 minutes ago, Nueces River Rat said:

Which begs the question about John Sharp….   Why hasn’t he been asked to retire or else?    He signed off on all of Jimbos deals and even said  it was too bad it wasn’t a 15 year deal.   I know he was only joking about that, but still he was all in on the 10 year extension.   

Sharp is aggy to the core. He is the embodiment of their redass idiocy. 

[Vermin 3,049]

I had no idea aggy was up to 77,000 students. I thought the Rick Perry plan to turn it into a diploma mill failed? Guess not.

[Pato del Muerto 52,524]

2 minutes ago, Vermin said:

I had no idea aggy was up to 77,000 students. I thought the Rick Perry plan to turn it into a diploma mill failed? Guess not.

And they have a shit ton of online classes now, especially the basics that all students have to take. So they are approaching southern New Hampshire or u of Phoenix 

[Fondren & Main 6,725]

So, for all of us keeping score at home…

1. Aggy fired their coach because Texas was winning too much.

2. Aggy had no plan for when they fired their coach because they are emotional nincompoops.

3. Aggy then bragged about how they had more money than everyone else.

4. Aggy hemmed and hawed about how they can pull sitting coaches at schools competing for the playoffs only to be soundly rebuffed.

5. Aggy admits they have to cut budget for football due to many foolish financial decisions.

6. ???

7. Aggy hires ERob.

8. ???

9. Profit?

[HtownHorn 14,724]

The cutting back in the analysts roles is going to really hurt them.

[BigHornedLurker 1,944]

13 minutes ago, HtownHorn said:

The cutting back in the analysts roles is going to really hurt them.

It's also small change . It'd like stopping buying coffee because you owe 2 million to a loan shark 

[Radical Larry 28,641]

I think they’re doing a fantastic job with this coaching hire. Don’t listen to the internet, Ags. Just keep doing what you do.

[BigSwingingD 719]

2 hours ago, Fondren & Main said:

So, for all of us keeping score at home…

1. Aggy fired their coach because Texas was winning too much.

2. Aggy had no plan for when they fired their coach because they are emotional nincompoops.

3. Aggy then bragged about how they had more money than everyone else.

4. Aggy hemmed and hawed about how they can pull sitting coaches at schools competing for the playoffs only to be soundly rebuffed.

5. Aggy admits they have to cut budget for football due to many foolish financial decisions.

6. ???

7. Aggy hires ERob.

8. ???

9. Profit?

"emotional nincompoops"

Perfect.  That's all you had to say. 

[billfromlaketravis 11,516]

3 hours ago, Fondren & Main said:

So, for all of us keeping score at home…

1. Aggy fired their coach because Texas was winning too much.

2. Aggy had no plan for when they fired their coach because they are emotional nincompoops.

3. Aggy then bragged about how they had more money than everyone else.

4. Aggy hemmed and hawed about how they can pull sitting coaches at schools competing for the playoffs only to be soundly rebuffed.

5. Aggy admits they have to cut budget for football due to many foolish financial decisions.

6. ???

7. Aggy hires ERob.

8. ???

9. Profit?

ERob has to be the leader in the clubhouse right now. Bjork could be looking for a fall guy because they’re broke and he knows they’ll lose to Texas next year.

1) Cheap

2) He’ll keep all the assistants.

3) He’ll sign whatever incentives laden contract aggy puts in front of him. 

4) He can retain most of the defensive roster.

5) John Blake 2.0
 

[Coelenterate Fuccboi 13,116]

You mother fuckers won’t think it’s funny when Ryan Day steps off the plane to his band of greeters and is immediately handed his national championship trophy (date TBD). 

[Napoleon 8,689]

6 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

And they have a shit ton of online classes now, especially the basics that all students have to take. So they are approaching southern New Hampshire or u of Phoenix 

In fairness, lower division classes at UT were worthless classes that I should have taken at a community college before arriving in Austin.

If I had the opportunity to have taken my lower div classes online I would have finished faster, done better, and had a better attendance record.

 

4 hours ago, HtownHorn said:

The cutting back in the analysts❌ roles is going to really hurt them.

“Analists” ✅

Losing out on hired analists isn’t going to hurt aggy as much as it will the sheep.

 

2 hours ago, billfromlaketravis said:

ERob has to be the leader in the clubhouse right now. Bjork could be looking for a fall guy because they’re broke and he knows they’ll lose to Texas next year.

5) John Blake 2.0
 

Ufff!!

I went to John Blake’s first TX/OU game in 1996. It was the first year with OT and the game went to OT.

Not posting the score, but I just hope that JB 2.0 has a slight plot twist that differentiates it from J.B. 1.0.

[Leanderman 2,275]

Aggie continue to find hidden gems to recruit

 

[Bevo14 8,333]

5 hours ago, Coelenterate Fuccboi said:

You mother fuckers won’t think it’s funny when Ryan Day steps off the plane to his band of greeters and is immediately handed his national championship trophy (date 30--). 

Fify

Edited November 24, 2023 by Bevo14

[Treefidy 1,468]

18 hours ago, TexasRenegade said:

“We’ve had some excess,” he admits. “Our staff pool for the entire football program was over $13 million. Other programs in the SEC are in the $9 million to $10.5 million range.” 

 

Bjorks says other sports are safe some seeing their budgets cuts, and says job cuts will be confined to the football program. 

 

“Analysts, recruiting positions, operational positions,” Bjork says when asked where he says fat can be trimmed. 

 

He also pointed out how the Aggies’ travel budget was out of sync with other teams. 

 

"Our program under Coach Fisher was leaving [for away games] on Thursday nights," Bjork says. "And so that’s added hotel rooms, that’s added meals. Everybody else leaves on Friday for a road game."

It’s college station.  If I were coach there I would be leaving for away games on sundays while trying to schedule fewer home games

[billfromlaketravis 11,516]

56 minutes ago, Treefidy said:

It’s college station.  If I were coach there I would be leaving for away games on sundays while trying to schedule fewer home games

Yeah if Bjork is bitching about hotel meals, I doubt he’d spring for a house in The Woodlands and a car service for the new coach. 

[Deej 76,830]

12 hours ago, Nueces River Rat said:

Which begs the question about John Sharp….   Why hasn’t he been asked to retire or else?    He signed off on all of Jimbos deals and even said  it was too bad it wasn’t a 15 year deal.   I know he was only joking about that, but still he was all in on the 10 year extension.   

To be fair, he was expecting several more hurricanes to allow him to steal from the disaster fund.

[Deej 76,830]

10 hours ago, HtownHorn said:

The cutting back in the analysts roles is going to really hurt them.

They'll just give professors and women's athletic staff football analyst titles and then fire them.

[Pato del Muerto 52,524]

[Teryor 4,476]

The Athletic: Jimbo Fisher’s failures left Texas A&M well short of national championship dreams

Featuring this awesome quote, which I'm not sure if 247 should take as them having the best rankings or being poor talent evaluators

Quote

But the pursuit of the top-ranked 2022 class, which is the highest-rated in the modern era, became an obsession for Fisher and his staff, to the point that Fisher inquired about the 247Sports Class Calculator and how certain commits would affect A&M’s recruiting ranking. The former A&M recruiting staffer said Fisher ignored character questions if the recruits were five-star prospects.

Spoiler

When Texas A&M hired Fisher in December 2017, it was widely considered a coup. Two months later, Texas A&M System chancellor John Sharp handed him a plaque proclaiming a future national title with the date unfilled. At FSU, Fisher went 83-23, led the Seminoles to a BCS national championship and a College Football Playoff appearance.

The fast-talking West Virginia native admired A&M’s top-notch resources. The Aggies had a top-10 athletic budget, spent half a billion dollars on facility renovations, had given their previous coach a massive contract, had unparalleled fan support and resided in a recruiting hotbed. He trusted then-A&M athletic director Scott Woodward, whom he’d known since his LSU days. The program checked a lot of boxes, except championships: The Aggies won their last conference title in 1998 and their last national championship in 1939.

Fisher, who knew how to win, was the missing piece, or so the Aggies thought. After giving Fisher a 10-year, $75 million contract, Sharp told the Houston Chronicle that his only concern with the length of the contract was that he couldn’t get Fisher to agree to a 15-year deal.

Looking back, Fisher’s best days were behind him.

“Jimbo lost his fastball,” a former Texas A&M staffer said. “He was hungry and motivated at FSU. Then he started reading his press clippings.”

The downfall wasn’t immediate. In Fisher’s first year, the Aggies went 9-4 and beat LSU for the first time since joining the SEC. He ensured every staff member received a game ball to commemorate the historic seven-overtime victory.

In year three, A&M had its best season of the Fisher era. The Aggies went 9-1 in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign, winning the Orange Bowl and finishing fourth in the Associated Press poll, their highest postseason ranking in 81 years. He elevated recruiting and stockpiled the roster with elite talent. In a postgame victory speech at the Orange Bowl, Fisher proclaimed, “We ain’t done yet.”

In September 2021, Fisher signed a contract extension for 10 years and nearly $95 million guaranteed. A month later, Fisher scored the landmark victory of his tenure, a 41-38 upset of No. 1 Alabama. That winter, A&M signed the highest-rated recruiting class of the modern era. On signing day, Fisher — while denying accusations that A&M bought the class — vowed, “If you don’t like that we’re coming on, get used to it. I ain’t going nowhere.”

go-deeper
GO DEEPER

Jimbo Fisher triggered by accusations of NIL slush fund: Calls rumors ‘garbage’ and ‘irresponsible as hell’

But as the program peaked, cracks in the foundation began to show. None were more visible than A&M’s decline on offense, which was supposed to be Fisher’s specialty.

The Aggies lost quarterbacks to season-ending injuries three years in a row. Offensive line play deteriorated. Fisher, who was the primary play caller and handled the offensive game plan, evolved slowly.

“Jimbo’s scheme was antiquated in 2014 when he won a national championship at Florida State,” an opposing SEC staffer said. “It was kind of out-of-date then, and it’s just not gotten better in 10 years.”

The Aggies failed to score 30 points against FBS opponents in 13 consecutive games from November 2021 to November 2022. Calls from fans and critics for Fisher to ditch play calling and hire a true offensive coordinator grew louder as the Aggies stumbled to a losing record. Despite his defiant tone after the win over LSU, Fisher relented after the season, hiring former Arkansas and Louisville head coach Bobby Petrino.

In August, Petrino called the offensive installation “a collective effort” but said he would handle play-calling duties. Bjork confirmed Petrino did call the plays this season, but three athletic department sources said Petrino didn’t have full offensive control and that he called plays primarily from Fisher’s offensive scheme.

So why hire Petrino or a coordinator at all?

“He felt like he had to, just for perception,” the athletic department staffer said. “His ego would never allow him to (relinquish offensive control). He wants to prove to everybody, ‘See, my scheme works.’”

Said Bjork to The Athletic, “My job was to say, ‘Coach, we’ve talked about an OC. Now’s the time. You’ve said it. We all agree. We’re going to turn it loose.’ And however it worked after that, that was up to them.”

Five people in or close to the program described Fisher as stubborn. If something worked at FSU in 2013, Fisher’s belief was that it would work at Texas A&M. Suggestions to do things differently weren’t often well-received.

“He liked confirmation,” a former A&M assistant said. “Sometimes the coaches would just say whatever they thought he wanted to hear because they’d be burned out in meetings. … You knew he was gonna do whatever he wanted to do anyways.”

Said the former A&M staffer, “If you told him ‘no,’ or something he didn’t want to hear, he would talk s— about you, like a little kid or something.”

Fisher’s contract armed him with immense power. The athletic department staffer said Fisher made it known he could get others fired: “He would say, ‘I’ve got the stick, and I’ll use it.’”

The offense received the bulk of Fisher’s attention. A lot of a team’s shortcomings can be papered over by a great quarterback, and Fisher understood that. Jameis Winston, Christian Ponder, EJ Manuel and JaMarcus Russell became first-round picks under his direction at Florida State and LSU. Fisher, who played quarterback at Samford, was also hardest on his quarterbacks.

“He’d dog-cuss QBs,” a former personnel staffer said. “I’ve never seen a dude tear up a young quarterback like Jimbo did.”

Despite his early success with FSU QBs, he later struggled to develop his quarterback recruits into stars. Since Winston, not a single Fisher high school quarterback recruit has finished his career as the starter at the school to which Fisher recruited him. At Texas A&M, the only quarterback that started and finished consecutive seasons under Fisher is one he didn’t recruit: Kellen Mond.

Jimbo Fisher’s high school QB signees since Jameis Winston

John Franklin III
2013, FSU
Transferred after 2 seasons
JJ Cosentino
2014, FSU
30 career attempts, no starts in 4 years
Deondre Francois
2015, FSU
Transferred after 4 seasons
De’Andre Johnson
2016, FSU
Dismissed
Malik Henry
2016, FSU
Transferred in first season
Bailey Hockman
2017, FSU
Transferred after 1 season
James Blackman
2017, FSU
Transferred after 4 seasons
James Foster
2018, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Zach Calzada
2019, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Haynes King
2020, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Eli Stowers
2021, Texas A&M
Transferred after 2 seasons
Conner Weigman
2022, Texas A&M
Sophomore at Texas A&M
Marcel Reed
2023, Texas A&M
Freshman at Texas A&M
A former A&M recruiting staffer pointed to mechanics and how Fisher instructs quarterbacks to hold the ball as a hindrance, citing the case of Haynes King, a former four-star recruit who transferred to Georgia Tech last winter and has been more successful there than he was at A&M. King’s personal quarterback trainer told 247Sports in October that King’s throwing motion had become elongated.

“If you watch film, you’ll see Haynes King is holding the ball really, really high at a certain location,” the former recruiting staffer said. “Now you see Haynes King playing free and open. … (Fisher) tries to mold them in a certain way … it may have worked in the ’90s when he was at Samford, but these kids these days? They want to play more like Patrick Mahomes. They want to play free.”

The development issues weren’t exclusive to quarterback. The offensive line, despite having two freshman All-Americans in 2021, has regressed, ranking last in the SEC in pressure rate allowed in three consecutive seasons, according to TruMedia. Fisher hasn’t had a 1,000-yard receiver since 2014, and none of his wide receiver recruits at A&M have turned into NFL Draft picks.

“We played them last year, and we were like, ‘Holy s—.’ There was first-round talent across the defensive line, the entire two-deep,” the SEC staffer said. “And then you play them this year and it’s like, ‘They’re still really good, but it felt like we played the exact same team last year.’ Are these guys really developing?”

The recruiting department is symbolic of how Fisher handled things. During his first fall at A&M, he walked into the bullpen where recruiting staffers worked and told them recruiting would take care of itself. “If you win games, you will land good recruits,” Fisher said, according to the former personnel staffer. “If you lose games, you will not land good recruits.”

That simplistic view isn’t entirely off base, but as roster management evolved, the need for an efficient, well-run recruiting department, led by a director of player personnel or general manager running the operation as the head coach’s proxy, has grown more important.

There were no consistently scheduled days for the on-field coaching staff to watch recruiting film as a group, which is unusual, the personnel staffer said. The former A&M recruiting staffer bemoaned Fisher’s indifference to the details.

“We’d sometimes watch kids as an entire staff and provide them all this information that was never ingested,” the recruiting staffer said. “We’d have sheets upon sheets, and (Fisher) didn’t even care. He didn’t want to go over the itineraries for recruiting visits. Didn’t care.”

Fisher’s reluctance to evolve in certain player acquisition areas also became an issue. Before this year, he rarely utilized the transfer portal, signing only seven scholarship transfers in his first five seasons. He signed 10 before this season out of necessity because more than two dozen players from the 2022 team hit the transfer portal.

A&M endured constant turnover in its recruiting and personnel department. After signing the No. 1 class in 2022, much of that staff departed, including director of player personnel Marshall Malchow, who joined Dan Lanning at Oregon. Four months later, Fisher hired Kevin Mashack from Indiana to succeed Malchow but parted ways with him after a year. For the past five months, A&M hasn’t had a director of player personnel, a position filled at every other SEC program and every Power 5 program in Texas.

“That position is so, so important in today’s environment,” Bjork told The Athletic.

That A&M doesn’t have a player personnel director with the winter transfer portal window set to open on Dec. 4 is “alarming,” the former personnel staffer said.

While the recruiting department was an afterthought, Fisher was passionate about landing top players.

Fisher has always recruited high school prospects well. Of his 13 signing classes as a head coach, 10 ranked in the top 10 nationally. Former staffers lauded Fisher’s charisma with recruits and families and ability to form bonds with them. “Jimbo is a great closer,” the former A&M recruiting staffer said.

But the pursuit of the top-ranked 2022 class, which is the highest-rated in the modern era, became an obsession for Fisher and his staff, to the point that Fisher inquired about the 247Sports Class Calculator and how certain commits would affect A&M’s recruiting ranking. The former A&M recruiting staffer said Fisher ignored character questions if the recruits were five-star prospects.

“He’s like, ‘Nope, he’s a five-star, we wanna take him,’” the staffer said.

Multiple members of that signing class broke team rules that warranted suspensions. Seven members of the 2022 class transferred out after their first season, including all four who were suspended.

“It’s like we’ve collected the most talent possible but I don’t think it was really strategically done the way you’d build a roster,” the current team staffer said. “They were just acquiring talent. I don’t know how much of a team it was.”

That could apply to the staff as well. Although Fisher had three former head coaches on his staff — Petrino, defensive coordinator DJ Durkin and offensive line coach Steve Addazio — and trusted them to do their jobs, team staffers say Fisher provided no clear direction on how people were supposed to operate.

“We had no idea what was going on or when we were off,” the former A&M recruiting staffer said. “He could take his private jet and go back home to see his kids or wherever, and we’re sitting there like, ‘Well, shoot, now we have the weekend off, didn’t know about that because Jimbo didn’t care to tell us.’”

Fisher kept a tight circle, confiding mostly in his right-hand man, director of football operations Mark Robinson, and receivers coach Dameyune Craig. But the buck stopped with Fisher and processes often bottlenecked as a result.

“He was the only one who could make a decision,” the athletic department staffer said. “Nobody else was empowered to make a decision.”

The chaos trickled down to the roster. Although disciplinary measures for those 2022 freshmen became public, multiple people within the program described poor day-to-day discipline and accountability for players toward the end of the Fisher era. Being late to meetings or workouts was met with few, if any, consequences.

“It was kids doing whatever they wanted,” the former assistant said. “And Jimbo showed a little leniency to those kids. Then, the older kids on the team were saying, ‘When we were kids on the team, you didn’t let us do it that way.’ It wasn’t good.”

After those 2022 recruits left the program, discipline improved in 2023. But the on-field issues persisted. Quarterback Conner Weigman’s season-ending injury in September was a major blow. The offensive line struggled more than ever. A&M’s special teams allowed three touchdown returns and was one of the worst units nationally in kickoff coverage (Fisher didn’t have a full-time on-field assistant dedicated to special teams).

A 15-point road loss to Miami in Week 2 foreshadowed issues that lingered. One-score losses to Alabama, Tennessee and Ole Miss left fans and school leadership frustrated. “Our program is stuck in neutral,” Bjork said the day A&M fired Fisher.

Over time, the dysfunction took its toll. Despite having top-10 roster talent each of the past three seasons, A&M went 19-15 overall, 10-13 against SEC teams and 12-14 against Power 5 competition under Fisher from 2021 to ’23. That included seven consecutive losses in games decided by one score and a nine-game road losing streak. The athletic department staffer called football the worst-run sport in A&M’s athletic department.

“It seems like things were just really hard,” Bjork told The Athletic. “And look, winning is hard, I get it. But processes and procedures should not be hard.”

A Week 2 loss to Miami this September put a concerning ceiling on Fisher’s sixth season. (Sam Navarro / USA Today)
So where does Texas A&M go from here?

The administration is more than a week into a wide-ranging coaching search. The sooner A&M can get someone in place, the better. Bjork set the opening day of the winter transfer portal window, Dec. 4, as an informal deadline to give the new coach a chance to retain as much of the roster as possible.

Several names have been connected to the A&M job. Mike Elko, who is only the second coach to take Duke to consecutive bowl appearances, seems like a natural fit given his previous experience with A&M as Fisher’s defensive coordinator.

UTSA coach Jeff Traylor, who has taken the Roadrunners to consecutive conference championships and has them in the mix for a third, would provide a Texas-heavy identity given his background as a former state championship-winning high school coach in the state. Kansas coach Lance Leipold’s work pulling the Jayhawks from the ashes would give the Aggies a builder. Arizona coach Jedd Fisch’s varied background includes extensive NFL experience coupled with his revival of the Wildcats, who went winless the season before he took over.

Bjork has specific traits he’s seeking in the next coach. Among the dozen attributes he listed, phrases like “supreme organizational skills,” a “culture of discipline” and someone who “can capitalize on modern day college athletics” stand out given Fisher’s shortcomings.

This time, there will be no plaques, no 10-year guaranteed contracts. The hire will be more grounded in reality. But the Aggies won’t change their lofty ambitions. If they can keep their loaded roster together, they should.

“Expectations should be sky-high there, because of the resources they have,” the former assistant said. “That school deserved way more than what we gave them the last few years.”

The Fisher hire proved that it’s not as simple as pairing a big-time coach with a ton of resources. There are no shortcuts to a championship. Texas A&M must find its man to build the program without skipping steps.

“The ingredients for a championship are here,” Bjork said. “Aggies want to do it the right way and deserve excellence in everything that we do.”

 

[Bevo14 8,333]

15 minutes ago, Teryor said:

The Athletic: Jimbo Fisher’s failures left Texas A&M well short of national championship dreams

Featuring this awesome quote, which I'm not sure if 247 should take as them having the best rankings or being poor talent evaluators

  Reveal hidden contents

When Texas A&M hired Fisher in December 2017, it was widely considered a coup. Two months later, Texas A&M System chancellor John Sharp handed him a plaque proclaiming a future national title with the date unfilled. At FSU, Fisher went 83-23, led the Seminoles to a BCS national championship and a College Football Playoff appearance.

The fast-talking West Virginia native admired A&M’s top-notch resources. The Aggies had a top-10 athletic budget, spent half a billion dollars on facility renovations, had given their previous coach a massive contract, had unparalleled fan support and resided in a recruiting hotbed. He trusted then-A&M athletic director Scott Woodward, whom he’d known since his LSU days. The program checked a lot of boxes, except championships: The Aggies won their last conference title in 1998 and their last national championship in 1939.

Fisher, who knew how to win, was the missing piece, or so the Aggies thought. After giving Fisher a 10-year, $75 million contract, Sharp told the Houston Chronicle that his only concern with the length of the contract was that he couldn’t get Fisher to agree to a 15-year deal.

Looking back, Fisher’s best days were behind him.

“Jimbo lost his fastball,” a former Texas A&M staffer said. “He was hungry and motivated at FSU. Then he started reading his press clippings.”

The downfall wasn’t immediate. In Fisher’s first year, the Aggies went 9-4 and beat LSU for the first time since joining the SEC. He ensured every staff member received a game ball to commemorate the historic seven-overtime victory.

In year three, A&M had its best season of the Fisher era. The Aggies went 9-1 in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign, winning the Orange Bowl and finishing fourth in the Associated Press poll, their highest postseason ranking in 81 years. He elevated recruiting and stockpiled the roster with elite talent. In a postgame victory speech at the Orange Bowl, Fisher proclaimed, “We ain’t done yet.”

In September 2021, Fisher signed a contract extension for 10 years and nearly $95 million guaranteed. A month later, Fisher scored the landmark victory of his tenure, a 41-38 upset of No. 1 Alabama. That winter, A&M signed the highest-rated recruiting class of the modern era. On signing day, Fisher — while denying accusations that A&M bought the class — vowed, “If you don’t like that we’re coming on, get used to it. I ain’t going nowhere.”

go-deeper
GO DEEPER

Jimbo Fisher triggered by accusations of NIL slush fund: Calls rumors ‘garbage’ and ‘irresponsible as hell’

But as the program peaked, cracks in the foundation began to show. None were more visible than A&M’s decline on offense, which was supposed to be Fisher’s specialty.

The Aggies lost quarterbacks to season-ending injuries three years in a row. Offensive line play deteriorated. Fisher, who was the primary play caller and handled the offensive game plan, evolved slowly.

“Jimbo’s scheme was antiquated in 2014 when he won a national championship at Florida State,” an opposing SEC staffer said. “It was kind of out-of-date then, and it’s just not gotten better in 10 years.”

The Aggies failed to score 30 points against FBS opponents in 13 consecutive games from November 2021 to November 2022. Calls from fans and critics for Fisher to ditch play calling and hire a true offensive coordinator grew louder as the Aggies stumbled to a losing record. Despite his defiant tone after the win over LSU, Fisher relented after the season, hiring former Arkansas and Louisville head coach Bobby Petrino.

In August, Petrino called the offensive installation “a collective effort” but said he would handle play-calling duties. Bjork confirmed Petrino did call the plays this season, but three athletic department sources said Petrino didn’t have full offensive control and that he called plays primarily from Fisher’s offensive scheme.

So why hire Petrino or a coordinator at all?

“He felt like he had to, just for perception,” the athletic department staffer said. “His ego would never allow him to (relinquish offensive control). He wants to prove to everybody, ‘See, my scheme works.’”

Said Bjork to The Athletic, “My job was to say, ‘Coach, we’ve talked about an OC. Now’s the time. You’ve said it. We all agree. We’re going to turn it loose.’ And however it worked after that, that was up to them.”

Five people in or close to the program described Fisher as stubborn. If something worked at FSU in 2013, Fisher’s belief was that it would work at Texas A&M. Suggestions to do things differently weren’t often well-received.

“He liked confirmation,” a former A&M assistant said. “Sometimes the coaches would just say whatever they thought he wanted to hear because they’d be burned out in meetings. … You knew he was gonna do whatever he wanted to do anyways.”

Said the former A&M staffer, “If you told him ‘no,’ or something he didn’t want to hear, he would talk s— about you, like a little kid or something.”

Fisher’s contract armed him with immense power. The athletic department staffer said Fisher made it known he could get others fired: “He would say, ‘I’ve got the stick, and I’ll use it.’”

The offense received the bulk of Fisher’s attention. A lot of a team’s shortcomings can be papered over by a great quarterback, and Fisher understood that. Jameis Winston, Christian Ponder, EJ Manuel and JaMarcus Russell became first-round picks under his direction at Florida State and LSU. Fisher, who played quarterback at Samford, was also hardest on his quarterbacks.

“He’d dog-cuss QBs,” a former personnel staffer said. “I’ve never seen a dude tear up a young quarterback like Jimbo did.”

Despite his early success with FSU QBs, he later struggled to develop his quarterback recruits into stars. Since Winston, not a single Fisher high school quarterback recruit has finished his career as the starter at the school to which Fisher recruited him. At Texas A&M, the only quarterback that started and finished consecutive seasons under Fisher is one he didn’t recruit: Kellen Mond.

Jimbo Fisher’s high school QB signees since Jameis Winston

John Franklin III
2013, FSU
Transferred after 2 seasons
JJ Cosentino
2014, FSU
30 career attempts, no starts in 4 years
Deondre Francois
2015, FSU
Transferred after 4 seasons
De’Andre Johnson
2016, FSU
Dismissed
Malik Henry
2016, FSU
Transferred in first season
Bailey Hockman
2017, FSU
Transferred after 1 season
James Blackman
2017, FSU
Transferred after 4 seasons
James Foster
2018, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Zach Calzada
2019, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Haynes King
2020, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Eli Stowers
2021, Texas A&M
Transferred after 2 seasons
Conner Weigman
2022, Texas A&M
Sophomore at Texas A&M
Marcel Reed
2023, Texas A&M
Freshman at Texas A&M
A former A&M recruiting staffer pointed to mechanics and how Fisher instructs quarterbacks to hold the ball as a hindrance, citing the case of Haynes King, a former four-star recruit who transferred to Georgia Tech last winter and has been more successful there than he was at A&M. King’s personal quarterback trainer told 247Sports in October that King’s throwing motion had become elongated.

“If you watch film, you’ll see Haynes King is holding the ball really, really high at a certain location,” the former recruiting staffer said. “Now you see Haynes King playing free and open. … (Fisher) tries to mold them in a certain way … it may have worked in the ’90s when he was at Samford, but these kids these days? They want to play more like Patrick Mahomes. They want to play free.”

The development issues weren’t exclusive to quarterback. The offensive line, despite having two freshman All-Americans in 2021, has regressed, ranking last in the SEC in pressure rate allowed in three consecutive seasons, according to TruMedia. Fisher hasn’t had a 1,000-yard receiver since 2014, and none of his wide receiver recruits at A&M have turned into NFL Draft picks.

“We played them last year, and we were like, ‘Holy s—.’ There was first-round talent across the defensive line, the entire two-deep,” the SEC staffer said. “And then you play them this year and it’s like, ‘They’re still really good, but it felt like we played the exact same team last year.’ Are these guys really developing?”

The recruiting department is symbolic of how Fisher handled things. During his first fall at A&M, he walked into the bullpen where recruiting staffers worked and told them recruiting would take care of itself. “If you win games, you will land good recruits,” Fisher said, according to the former personnel staffer. “If you lose games, you will not land good recruits.”

That simplistic view isn’t entirely off base, but as roster management evolved, the need for an efficient, well-run recruiting department, led by a director of player personnel or general manager running the operation as the head coach’s proxy, has grown more important.

There were no consistently scheduled days for the on-field coaching staff to watch recruiting film as a group, which is unusual, the personnel staffer said. The former A&M recruiting staffer bemoaned Fisher’s indifference to the details.

“We’d sometimes watch kids as an entire staff and provide them all this information that was never ingested,” the recruiting staffer said. “We’d have sheets upon sheets, and (Fisher) didn’t even care. He didn’t want to go over the itineraries for recruiting visits. Didn’t care.”

Fisher’s reluctance to evolve in certain player acquisition areas also became an issue. Before this year, he rarely utilized the transfer portal, signing only seven scholarship transfers in his first five seasons. He signed 10 before this season out of necessity because more than two dozen players from the 2022 team hit the transfer portal.

A&M endured constant turnover in its recruiting and personnel department. After signing the No. 1 class in 2022, much of that staff departed, including director of player personnel Marshall Malchow, who joined Dan Lanning at Oregon. Four months later, Fisher hired Kevin Mashack from Indiana to succeed Malchow but parted ways with him after a year. For the past five months, A&M hasn’t had a director of player personnel, a position filled at every other SEC program and every Power 5 program in Texas.

“That position is so, so important in today’s environment,” Bjork told The Athletic.

That A&M doesn’t have a player personnel director with the winter transfer portal window set to open on Dec. 4 is “alarming,” the former personnel staffer said.

While the recruiting department was an afterthought, Fisher was passionate about landing top players.

Fisher has always recruited high school prospects well. Of his 13 signing classes as a head coach, 10 ranked in the top 10 nationally. Former staffers lauded Fisher’s charisma with recruits and families and ability to form bonds with them. “Jimbo is a great closer,” the former A&M recruiting staffer said.

But the pursuit of the top-ranked 2022 class, which is the highest-rated in the modern era, became an obsession for Fisher and his staff, to the point that Fisher inquired about the 247Sports Class Calculator and how certain commits would affect A&M’s recruiting ranking. The former A&M recruiting staffer said Fisher ignored character questions if the recruits were five-star prospects.

“He’s like, ‘Nope, he’s a five-star, we wanna take him,’” the staffer said.

Multiple members of that signing class broke team rules that warranted suspensions. Seven members of the 2022 class transferred out after their first season, including all four who were suspended.

“It’s like we’ve collected the most talent possible but I don’t think it was really strategically done the way you’d build a roster,” the current team staffer said. “They were just acquiring talent. I don’t know how much of a team it was.”

That could apply to the staff as well. Although Fisher had three former head coaches on his staff — Petrino, defensive coordinator DJ Durkin and offensive line coach Steve Addazio — and trusted them to do their jobs, team staffers say Fisher provided no clear direction on how people were supposed to operate.

“We had no idea what was going on or when we were off,” the former A&M recruiting staffer said. “He could take his private jet and go back home to see his kids or wherever, and we’re sitting there like, ‘Well, shoot, now we have the weekend off, didn’t know about that because Jimbo didn’t care to tell us.’”

Fisher kept a tight circle, confiding mostly in his right-hand man, director of football operations Mark Robinson, and receivers coach Dameyune Craig. But the buck stopped with Fisher and processes often bottlenecked as a result.

“He was the only one who could make a decision,” the athletic department staffer said. “Nobody else was empowered to make a decision.”

The chaos trickled down to the roster. Although disciplinary measures for those 2022 freshmen became public, multiple people within the program described poor day-to-day discipline and accountability for players toward the end of the Fisher era. Being late to meetings or workouts was met with few, if any, consequences.

“It was kids doing whatever they wanted,” the former assistant said. “And Jimbo showed a little leniency to those kids. Then, the older kids on the team were saying, ‘When we were kids on the team, you didn’t let us do it that way.’ It wasn’t good.”

After those 2022 recruits left the program, discipline improved in 2023. But the on-field issues persisted. Quarterback Conner Weigman’s season-ending injury in September was a major blow. The offensive line struggled more than ever. A&M’s special teams allowed three touchdown returns and was one of the worst units nationally in kickoff coverage (Fisher didn’t have a full-time on-field assistant dedicated to special teams).

A 15-point road loss to Miami in Week 2 foreshadowed issues that lingered. One-score losses to Alabama, Tennessee and Ole Miss left fans and school leadership frustrated. “Our program is stuck in neutral,” Bjork said the day A&M fired Fisher.

Over time, the dysfunction took its toll. Despite having top-10 roster talent each of the past three seasons, A&M went 19-15 overall, 10-13 against SEC teams and 12-14 against Power 5 competition under Fisher from 2021 to ’23. That included seven consecutive losses in games decided by one score and a nine-game road losing streak. The athletic department staffer called football the worst-run sport in A&M’s athletic department.

“It seems like things were just really hard,” Bjork told The Athletic. “And look, winning is hard, I get it. But processes and procedures should not be hard.”

A Week 2 loss to Miami this September put a concerning ceiling on Fisher’s sixth season. (Sam Navarro / USA Today)
So where does Texas A&M go from here?

The administration is more than a week into a wide-ranging coaching search. The sooner A&M can get someone in place, the better. Bjork set the opening day of the winter transfer portal window, Dec. 4, as an informal deadline to give the new coach a chance to retain as much of the roster as possible.

Several names have been connected to the A&M job. Mike Elko, who is only the second coach to take Duke to consecutive bowl appearances, seems like a natural fit given his previous experience with A&M as Fisher’s defensive coordinator.

UTSA coach Jeff Traylor, who has taken the Roadrunners to consecutive conference championships and has them in the mix for a third, would provide a Texas-heavy identity given his background as a former state championship-winning high school coach in the state. Kansas coach Lance Leipold’s work pulling the Jayhawks from the ashes would give the Aggies a builder. Arizona coach Jedd Fisch’s varied background includes extensive NFL experience coupled with his revival of the Wildcats, who went winless the season before he took over.

Bjork has specific traits he’s seeking in the next coach. Among the dozen attributes he listed, phrases like “supreme organizational skills,” a “culture of discipline” and someone who “can capitalize on modern day college athletics” stand out given Fisher’s shortcomings.

This time, there will be no plaques, no 10-year guaranteed contracts. The hire will be more grounded in reality. But the Aggies won’t change their lofty ambitions. If they can keep their loaded roster together, they should.

“Expectations should be sky-high there, because of the resources they have,” the former assistant said. “That school deserved way more than what we gave them the last few years.”

The Fisher hire proved that it’s not as simple as pairing a big-time coach with a ton of resources. There are no shortcuts to a championship. Texas A&M must find its man to build the program without skipping steps.

“The ingredients for a championship are here,” Bjork said. “Aggies want to do it the right way and deserve excellence in everything that we do.”

 

[Elmer_Fudd 22,281]

20 minutes ago, Teryor said:

The Athletic: Jimbo Fisher’s failures left Texas A&M well short of national championship dreams

Featuring this awesome quote, which I'm not sure if 247 should take as them having the best rankings or being poor talent evaluators

  Hide contents

When Texas A&M hired Fisher in December 2017, it was widely considered a coup. Two months later, Texas A&M System chancellor John Sharp handed him a plaque proclaiming a future national title with the date unfilled. At FSU, Fisher went 83-23, led the Seminoles to a BCS national championship and a College Football Playoff appearance.

The fast-talking West Virginia native admired A&M’s top-notch resources. The Aggies had a top-10 athletic budget, spent half a billion dollars on facility renovations, had given their previous coach a massive contract, had unparalleled fan support and resided in a recruiting hotbed. He trusted then-A&M athletic director Scott Woodward, whom he’d known since his LSU days. The program checked a lot of boxes, except championships: The Aggies won their last conference title in 1998 and their last national championship in 1939.

Fisher, who knew how to win, was the missing piece, or so the Aggies thought. After giving Fisher a 10-year, $75 million contract, Sharp told the Houston Chronicle that his only concern with the length of the contract was that he couldn’t get Fisher to agree to a 15-year deal.

Looking back, Fisher’s best days were behind him.

“Jimbo lost his fastball,” a former Texas A&M staffer said. “He was hungry and motivated at FSU. Then he started reading his press clippings.”

The downfall wasn’t immediate. In Fisher’s first year, the Aggies went 9-4 and beat LSU for the first time since joining the SEC. He ensured every staff member received a game ball to commemorate the historic seven-overtime victory.

In year three, A&M had its best season of the Fisher era. The Aggies went 9-1 in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign, winning the Orange Bowl and finishing fourth in the Associated Press poll, their highest postseason ranking in 81 years. He elevated recruiting and stockpiled the roster with elite talent. In a postgame victory speech at the Orange Bowl, Fisher proclaimed, “We ain’t done yet.”

In September 2021, Fisher signed a contract extension for 10 years and nearly $95 million guaranteed. A month later, Fisher scored the landmark victory of his tenure, a 41-38 upset of No. 1 Alabama. That winter, A&M signed the highest-rated recruiting class of the modern era. On signing day, Fisher — while denying accusations that A&M bought the class — vowed, “If you don’t like that we’re coming on, get used to it. I ain’t going nowhere.”

go-deeper
GO DEEPER

Jimbo Fisher triggered by accusations of NIL slush fund: Calls rumors ‘garbage’ and ‘irresponsible as hell’

But as the program peaked, cracks in the foundation began to show. None were more visible than A&M’s decline on offense, which was supposed to be Fisher’s specialty.

The Aggies lost quarterbacks to season-ending injuries three years in a row. Offensive line play deteriorated. Fisher, who was the primary play caller and handled the offensive game plan, evolved slowly.

“Jimbo’s scheme was antiquated in 2014 when he won a national championship at Florida State,” an opposing SEC staffer said. “It was kind of out-of-date then, and it’s just not gotten better in 10 years.”

The Aggies failed to score 30 points against FBS opponents in 13 consecutive games from November 2021 to November 2022. Calls from fans and critics for Fisher to ditch play calling and hire a true offensive coordinator grew louder as the Aggies stumbled to a losing record. Despite his defiant tone after the win over LSU, Fisher relented after the season, hiring former Arkansas and Louisville head coach Bobby Petrino.

In August, Petrino called the offensive installation “a collective effort” but said he would handle play-calling duties. Bjork confirmed Petrino did call the plays this season, but three athletic department sources said Petrino didn’t have full offensive control and that he called plays primarily from Fisher’s offensive scheme.

So why hire Petrino or a coordinator at all?

“He felt like he had to, just for perception,” the athletic department staffer said. “His ego would never allow him to (relinquish offensive control). He wants to prove to everybody, ‘See, my scheme works.’”

Said Bjork to The Athletic, “My job was to say, ‘Coach, we’ve talked about an OC. Now’s the time. You’ve said it. We all agree. We’re going to turn it loose.’ And however it worked after that, that was up to them.”

Five people in or close to the program described Fisher as stubborn. If something worked at FSU in 2013, Fisher’s belief was that it would work at Texas A&M. Suggestions to do things differently weren’t often well-received.

“He liked confirmation,” a former A&M assistant said. “Sometimes the coaches would just say whatever they thought he wanted to hear because they’d be burned out in meetings. … You knew he was gonna do whatever he wanted to do anyways.”

Said the former A&M staffer, “If you told him ‘no,’ or something he didn’t want to hear, he would talk s— about you, like a little kid or something.”

Fisher’s contract armed him with immense power. The athletic department staffer said Fisher made it known he could get others fired: “He would say, ‘I’ve got the stick, and I’ll use it.’”

The offense received the bulk of Fisher’s attention. A lot of a team’s shortcomings can be papered over by a great quarterback, and Fisher understood that. Jameis Winston, Christian Ponder, EJ Manuel and JaMarcus Russell became first-round picks under his direction at Florida State and LSU. Fisher, who played quarterback at Samford, was also hardest on his quarterbacks.

“He’d dog-cuss QBs,” a former personnel staffer said. “I’ve never seen a dude tear up a young quarterback like Jimbo did.”

Despite his early success with FSU QBs, he later struggled to develop his quarterback recruits into stars. Since Winston, not a single Fisher high school quarterback recruit has finished his career as the starter at the school to which Fisher recruited him. At Texas A&M, the only quarterback that started and finished consecutive seasons under Fisher is one he didn’t recruit: Kellen Mond.

Jimbo Fisher’s high school QB signees since Jameis Winston

John Franklin III
2013, FSU
Transferred after 2 seasons
JJ Cosentino
2014, FSU
30 career attempts, no starts in 4 years
Deondre Francois
2015, FSU
Transferred after 4 seasons
De’Andre Johnson
2016, FSU
Dismissed
Malik Henry
2016, FSU
Transferred in first season
Bailey Hockman
2017, FSU
Transferred after 1 season
James Blackman
2017, FSU
Transferred after 4 seasons
James Foster
2018, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Zach Calzada
2019, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Haynes King
2020, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Eli Stowers
2021, Texas A&M
Transferred after 2 seasons
Conner Weigman
2022, Texas A&M
Sophomore at Texas A&M
Marcel Reed
2023, Texas A&M
Freshman at Texas A&M
A former A&M recruiting staffer pointed to mechanics and how Fisher instructs quarterbacks to hold the ball as a hindrance, citing the case of Haynes King, a former four-star recruit who transferred to Georgia Tech last winter and has been more successful there than he was at A&M. King’s personal quarterback trainer told 247Sports in October that King’s throwing motion had become elongated.

“If you watch film, you’ll see Haynes King is holding the ball really, really high at a certain location,” the former recruiting staffer said. “Now you see Haynes King playing free and open. … (Fisher) tries to mold them in a certain way … it may have worked in the ’90s when he was at Samford, but these kids these days? They want to play more like Patrick Mahomes. They want to play free.”

The development issues weren’t exclusive to quarterback. The offensive line, despite having two freshman All-Americans in 2021, has regressed, ranking last in the SEC in pressure rate allowed in three consecutive seasons, according to TruMedia. Fisher hasn’t had a 1,000-yard receiver since 2014, and none of his wide receiver recruits at A&M have turned into NFL Draft picks.

“We played them last year, and we were like, ‘Holy s—.’ There was first-round talent across the defensive line, the entire two-deep,” the SEC staffer said. “And then you play them this year and it’s like, ‘They’re still really good, but it felt like we played the exact same team last year.’ Are these guys really developing?”

The recruiting department is symbolic of how Fisher handled things. During his first fall at A&M, he walked into the bullpen where recruiting staffers worked and told them recruiting would take care of itself. “If you win games, you will land good recruits,” Fisher said, according to the former personnel staffer. “If you lose games, you will not land good recruits.”

That simplistic view isn’t entirely off base, but as roster management evolved, the need for an efficient, well-run recruiting department, led by a director of player personnel or general manager running the operation as the head coach’s proxy, has grown more important.

There were no consistently scheduled days for the on-field coaching staff to watch recruiting film as a group, which is unusual, the personnel staffer said. The former A&M recruiting staffer bemoaned Fisher’s indifference to the details.

“We’d sometimes watch kids as an entire staff and provide them all this information that was never ingested,” the recruiting staffer said. “We’d have sheets upon sheets, and (Fisher) didn’t even care. He didn’t want to go over the itineraries for recruiting visits. Didn’t care.”

Fisher’s reluctance to evolve in certain player acquisition areas also became an issue. Before this year, he rarely utilized the transfer portal, signing only seven scholarship transfers in his first five seasons. He signed 10 before this season out of necessity because more than two dozen players from the 2022 team hit the transfer portal.

A&M endured constant turnover in its recruiting and personnel department. After signing the No. 1 class in 2022, much of that staff departed, including director of player personnel Marshall Malchow, who joined Dan Lanning at Oregon. Four months later, Fisher hired Kevin Mashack from Indiana to succeed Malchow but parted ways with him after a year. For the past five months, A&M hasn’t had a director of player personnel, a position filled at every other SEC program and every Power 5 program in Texas.

“That position is so, so important in today’s environment,” Bjork told The Athletic.

That A&M doesn’t have a player personnel director with the winter transfer portal window set to open on Dec. 4 is “alarming,” the former personnel staffer said.

While the recruiting department was an afterthought, Fisher was passionate about landing top players.

Fisher has always recruited high school prospects well. Of his 13 signing classes as a head coach, 10 ranked in the top 10 nationally. Former staffers lauded Fisher’s charisma with recruits and families and ability to form bonds with them. “Jimbo is a great closer,” the former A&M recruiting staffer said.

But the pursuit of the top-ranked 2022 class, which is the highest-rated in the modern era, became an obsession for Fisher and his staff, to the point that Fisher inquired about the 247Sports Class Calculator and how certain commits would affect A&M’s recruiting ranking. The former A&M recruiting staffer said Fisher ignored character questions if the recruits were five-star prospects.

“He’s like, ‘Nope, he’s a five-star, we wanna take him,’” the staffer said.

Multiple members of that signing class broke team rules that warranted suspensions. Seven members of the 2022 class transferred out after their first season, including all four who were suspended.

“It’s like we’ve collected the most talent possible but I don’t think it was really strategically done the way you’d build a roster,” the current team staffer said. “They were just acquiring talent. I don’t know how much of a team it was.”

That could apply to the staff as well. Although Fisher had three former head coaches on his staff — Petrino, defensive coordinator DJ Durkin and offensive line coach Steve Addazio — and trusted them to do their jobs, team staffers say Fisher provided no clear direction on how people were supposed to operate.

“We had no idea what was going on or when we were off,” the former A&M recruiting staffer said. “He could take his private jet and go back home to see his kids or wherever, and we’re sitting there like, ‘Well, shoot, now we have the weekend off, didn’t know about that because Jimbo didn’t care to tell us.’”

Fisher kept a tight circle, confiding mostly in his right-hand man, director of football operations Mark Robinson, and receivers coach Dameyune Craig. But the buck stopped with Fisher and processes often bottlenecked as a result.

“He was the only one who could make a decision,” the athletic department staffer said. “Nobody else was empowered to make a decision.”

The chaos trickled down to the roster. Although disciplinary measures for those 2022 freshmen became public, multiple people within the program described poor day-to-day discipline and accountability for players toward the end of the Fisher era. Being late to meetings or workouts was met with few, if any, consequences.

“It was kids doing whatever they wanted,” the former assistant said. “And Jimbo showed a little leniency to those kids. Then, the older kids on the team were saying, ‘When we were kids on the team, you didn’t let us do it that way.’ It wasn’t good.”

After those 2022 recruits left the program, discipline improved in 2023. But the on-field issues persisted. Quarterback Conner Weigman’s season-ending injury in September was a major blow. The offensive line struggled more than ever. A&M’s special teams allowed three touchdown returns and was one of the worst units nationally in kickoff coverage (Fisher didn’t have a full-time on-field assistant dedicated to special teams).

A 15-point road loss to Miami in Week 2 foreshadowed issues that lingered. One-score losses to Alabama, Tennessee and Ole Miss left fans and school leadership frustrated. “Our program is stuck in neutral,” Bjork said the day A&M fired Fisher.

Over time, the dysfunction took its toll. Despite having top-10 roster talent each of the past three seasons, A&M went 19-15 overall, 10-13 against SEC teams and 12-14 against Power 5 competition under Fisher from 2021 to ’23. That included seven consecutive losses in games decided by one score and a nine-game road losing streak. The athletic department staffer called football the worst-run sport in A&M’s athletic department.

“It seems like things were just really hard,” Bjork told The Athletic. “And look, winning is hard, I get it. But processes and procedures should not be hard.”

A Week 2 loss to Miami this September put a concerning ceiling on Fisher’s sixth season. (Sam Navarro / USA Today)
So where does Texas A&M go from here?

The administration is more than a week into a wide-ranging coaching search. The sooner A&M can get someone in place, the better. Bjork set the opening day of the winter transfer portal window, Dec. 4, as an informal deadline to give the new coach a chance to retain as much of the roster as possible.

Several names have been connected to the A&M job. Mike Elko, who is only the second coach to take Duke to consecutive bowl appearances, seems like a natural fit given his previous experience with A&M as Fisher’s defensive coordinator.

UTSA coach Jeff Traylor, who has taken the Roadrunners to consecutive conference championships and has them in the mix for a third, would provide a Texas-heavy identity given his background as a former state championship-winning high school coach in the state. Kansas coach Lance Leipold’s work pulling the Jayhawks from the ashes would give the Aggies a builder. Arizona coach Jedd Fisch’s varied background includes extensive NFL experience coupled with his revival of the Wildcats, who went winless the season before he took over.

Bjork has specific traits he’s seeking in the next coach. Among the dozen attributes he listed, phrases like “supreme organizational skills,” a “culture of discipline” and someone who “can capitalize on modern day college athletics” stand out given Fisher’s shortcomings.

This time, there will be no plaques, no 10-year guaranteed contracts. The hire will be more grounded in reality. But the Aggies won’t change their lofty ambitions. If they can keep their loaded roster together, they should.

“Expectations should be sky-high there, because of the resources they have,” the former assistant said. “That school deserved way more than what we gave them the last few years.”

The Fisher hire proved that it’s not as simple as pairing a big-time coach with a ton of resources. There are no shortcuts to a championship. Texas A&M must find its man to build the program without skipping steps.

“The ingredients for a championship are here,” Bjork said. “Aggies want to do it the right way and deserve excellence in everything that we do.”

 

Damn I wish Dumbo would have lasted a few more years at least.

[Reese Bennett 3,615]

Quote

 

“He liked confirmation,” a former A&M assistant said. “Sometimes the coaches would just say whatever they thought he wanted to hear because they’d be burned out in meetings. … You knew he was gonna do whatever he wanted to do anyways.”

Said the former A&M staffer, “If you told him ‘no,’ or something he didn’t want to hear, he would talk s— about you, like a little kid or something.”

 

He is who we thought he was--a prickly, petulant little fuck.

[nnm 36,439]

1 minute ago, Reese Bennett said:

He is who we thought he was--a prickly, petulant little fuck.

How much more foolish does Looch look now in defending this jackass for 6 years?

[Tex Pete 20,399]

50 minutes ago, Teryor said:

The Athletic: Jimbo Fisher’s failures left Texas A&M well short of national championship dreams

Featuring this awesome quote, which I'm not sure if 247 should take as them having the best rankings or being poor talent evaluators

  Hide contents

When Texas A&M hired Fisher in December 2017, it was widely considered a coup. Two months later, Texas A&M System chancellor John Sharp handed him a plaque proclaiming a future national title with the date unfilled. At FSU, Fisher went 83-23, led the Seminoles to a BCS national championship and a College Football Playoff appearance.

The fast-talking West Virginia native admired A&M’s top-notch resources. The Aggies had a top-10 athletic budget, spent half a billion dollars on facility renovations, had given their previous coach a massive contract, had unparalleled fan support and resided in a recruiting hotbed. He trusted then-A&M athletic director Scott Woodward, whom he’d known since his LSU days. The program checked a lot of boxes, except championships: The Aggies won their last conference title in 1998 and their last national championship in 1939.

Fisher, who knew how to win, was the missing piece, or so the Aggies thought. After giving Fisher a 10-year, $75 million contract, Sharp told the Houston Chronicle that his only concern with the length of the contract was that he couldn’t get Fisher to agree to a 15-year deal.

Looking back, Fisher’s best days were behind him.

“Jimbo lost his fastball,” a former Texas A&M staffer said. “He was hungry and motivated at FSU. Then he started reading his press clippings.”

The downfall wasn’t immediate. In Fisher’s first year, the Aggies went 9-4 and beat LSU for the first time since joining the SEC. He ensured every staff member received a game ball to commemorate the historic seven-overtime victory.

In year three, A&M had its best season of the Fisher era. The Aggies went 9-1 in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign, winning the Orange Bowl and finishing fourth in the Associated Press poll, their highest postseason ranking in 81 years. He elevated recruiting and stockpiled the roster with elite talent. In a postgame victory speech at the Orange Bowl, Fisher proclaimed, “We ain’t done yet.”

In September 2021, Fisher signed a contract extension for 10 years and nearly $95 million guaranteed. A month later, Fisher scored the landmark victory of his tenure, a 41-38 upset of No. 1 Alabama. That winter, A&M signed the highest-rated recruiting class of the modern era. On signing day, Fisher — while denying accusations that A&M bought the class — vowed, “If you don’t like that we’re coming on, get used to it. I ain’t going nowhere.”

go-deeper
GO DEEPER

Jimbo Fisher triggered by accusations of NIL slush fund: Calls rumors ‘garbage’ and ‘irresponsible as hell’

But as the program peaked, cracks in the foundation began to show. None were more visible than A&M’s decline on offense, which was supposed to be Fisher’s specialty.

The Aggies lost quarterbacks to season-ending injuries three years in a row. Offensive line play deteriorated. Fisher, who was the primary play caller and handled the offensive game plan, evolved slowly.

“Jimbo’s scheme was antiquated in 2014 when he won a national championship at Florida State,” an opposing SEC staffer said. “It was kind of out-of-date then, and it’s just not gotten better in 10 years.”

The Aggies failed to score 30 points against FBS opponents in 13 consecutive games from November 2021 to November 2022. Calls from fans and critics for Fisher to ditch play calling and hire a true offensive coordinator grew louder as the Aggies stumbled to a losing record. Despite his defiant tone after the win over LSU, Fisher relented after the season, hiring former Arkansas and Louisville head coach Bobby Petrino.

In August, Petrino called the offensive installation “a collective effort” but said he would handle play-calling duties. Bjork confirmed Petrino did call the plays this season, but three athletic department sources said Petrino didn’t have full offensive control and that he called plays primarily from Fisher’s offensive scheme.

So why hire Petrino or a coordinator at all?

“He felt like he had to, just for perception,” the athletic department staffer said. “His ego would never allow him to (relinquish offensive control). He wants to prove to everybody, ‘See, my scheme works.’”

Said Bjork to The Athletic, “My job was to say, ‘Coach, we’ve talked about an OC. Now’s the time. You’ve said it. We all agree. We’re going to turn it loose.’ And however it worked after that, that was up to them.”

Five people in or close to the program described Fisher as stubborn. If something worked at FSU in 2013, Fisher’s belief was that it would work at Texas A&M. Suggestions to do things differently weren’t often well-received.

“He liked confirmation,” a former A&M assistant said. “Sometimes the coaches would just say whatever they thought he wanted to hear because they’d be burned out in meetings. … You knew he was gonna do whatever he wanted to do anyways.”

Said the former A&M staffer, “If you told him ‘no,’ or something he didn’t want to hear, he would talk s— about you, like a little kid or something.”

Fisher’s contract armed him with immense power. The athletic department staffer said Fisher made it known he could get others fired: “He would say, ‘I’ve got the stick, and I’ll use it.’”

The offense received the bulk of Fisher’s attention. A lot of a team’s shortcomings can be papered over by a great quarterback, and Fisher understood that. Jameis Winston, Christian Ponder, EJ Manuel and JaMarcus Russell became first-round picks under his direction at Florida State and LSU. Fisher, who played quarterback at Samford, was also hardest on his quarterbacks.

“He’d dog-cuss QBs,” a former personnel staffer said. “I’ve never seen a dude tear up a young quarterback like Jimbo did.”

Despite his early success with FSU QBs, he later struggled to develop his quarterback recruits into stars. Since Winston, not a single Fisher high school quarterback recruit has finished his career as the starter at the school to which Fisher recruited him. At Texas A&M, the only quarterback that started and finished consecutive seasons under Fisher is one he didn’t recruit: Kellen Mond.

Jimbo Fisher’s high school QB signees since Jameis Winston

John Franklin III
2013, FSU
Transferred after 2 seasons
JJ Cosentino
2014, FSU
30 career attempts, no starts in 4 years
Deondre Francois
2015, FSU
Transferred after 4 seasons
De’Andre Johnson
2016, FSU
Dismissed
Malik Henry
2016, FSU
Transferred in first season
Bailey Hockman
2017, FSU
Transferred after 1 season
James Blackman
2017, FSU
Transferred after 4 seasons
James Foster
2018, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Zach Calzada
2019, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Haynes King
2020, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Eli Stowers
2021, Texas A&M
Transferred after 2 seasons
Conner Weigman
2022, Texas A&M
Sophomore at Texas A&M
Marcel Reed
2023, Texas A&M
Freshman at Texas A&M
A former A&M recruiting staffer pointed to mechanics and how Fisher instructs quarterbacks to hold the ball as a hindrance, citing the case of Haynes King, a former four-star recruit who transferred to Georgia Tech last winter and has been more successful there than he was at A&M. King’s personal quarterback trainer told 247Sports in October that King’s throwing motion had become elongated.

“If you watch film, you’ll see Haynes King is holding the ball really, really high at a certain location,” the former recruiting staffer said. “Now you see Haynes King playing free and open. … (Fisher) tries to mold them in a certain way … it may have worked in the ’90s when he was at Samford, but these kids these days? They want to play more like Patrick Mahomes. They want to play free.”

The development issues weren’t exclusive to quarterback. The offensive line, despite having two freshman All-Americans in 2021, has regressed, ranking last in the SEC in pressure rate allowed in three consecutive seasons, according to TruMedia. Fisher hasn’t had a 1,000-yard receiver since 2014, and none of his wide receiver recruits at A&M have turned into NFL Draft picks.

“We played them last year, and we were like, ‘Holy s—.’ There was first-round talent across the defensive line, the entire two-deep,” the SEC staffer said. “And then you play them this year and it’s like, ‘They’re still really good, but it felt like we played the exact same team last year.’ Are these guys really developing?”

The recruiting department is symbolic of how Fisher handled things. During his first fall at A&M, he walked into the bullpen where recruiting staffers worked and told them recruiting would take care of itself. “If you win games, you will land good recruits,” Fisher said, according to the former personnel staffer. “If you lose games, you will not land good recruits.”

That simplistic view isn’t entirely off base, but as roster management evolved, the need for an efficient, well-run recruiting department, led by a director of player personnel or general manager running the operation as the head coach’s proxy, has grown more important.

There were no consistently scheduled days for the on-field coaching staff to watch recruiting film as a group, which is unusual, the personnel staffer said. The former A&M recruiting staffer bemoaned Fisher’s indifference to the details.

“We’d sometimes watch kids as an entire staff and provide them all this information that was never ingested,” the recruiting staffer said. “We’d have sheets upon sheets, and (Fisher) didn’t even care. He didn’t want to go over the itineraries for recruiting visits. Didn’t care.”

Fisher’s reluctance to evolve in certain player acquisition areas also became an issue. Before this year, he rarely utilized the transfer portal, signing only seven scholarship transfers in his first five seasons. He signed 10 before this season out of necessity because more than two dozen players from the 2022 team hit the transfer portal.

A&M endured constant turnover in its recruiting and personnel department. After signing the No. 1 class in 2022, much of that staff departed, including director of player personnel Marshall Malchow, who joined Dan Lanning at Oregon. Four months later, Fisher hired Kevin Mashack from Indiana to succeed Malchow but parted ways with him after a year. For the past five months, A&M hasn’t had a director of player personnel, a position filled at every other SEC program and every Power 5 program in Texas.

“That position is so, so important in today’s environment,” Bjork told The Athletic.

That A&M doesn’t have a player personnel director with the winter transfer portal window set to open on Dec. 4 is “alarming,” the former personnel staffer said.

While the recruiting department was an afterthought, Fisher was passionate about landing top players.

Fisher has always recruited high school prospects well. Of his 13 signing classes as a head coach, 10 ranked in the top 10 nationally. Former staffers lauded Fisher’s charisma with recruits and families and ability to form bonds with them. “Jimbo is a great closer,” the former A&M recruiting staffer said.

But the pursuit of the top-ranked 2022 class, which is the highest-rated in the modern era, became an obsession for Fisher and his staff, to the point that Fisher inquired about the 247Sports Class Calculator and how certain commits would affect A&M’s recruiting ranking. The former A&M recruiting staffer said Fisher ignored character questions if the recruits were five-star prospects.

“He’s like, ‘Nope, he’s a five-star, we wanna take him,’” the staffer said.

Multiple members of that signing class broke team rules that warranted suspensions. Seven members of the 2022 class transferred out after their first season, including all four who were suspended.

“It’s like we’ve collected the most talent possible but I don’t think it was really strategically done the way you’d build a roster,” the current team staffer said. “They were just acquiring talent. I don’t know how much of a team it was.”

That could apply to the staff as well. Although Fisher had three former head coaches on his staff — Petrino, defensive coordinator DJ Durkin and offensive line coach Steve Addazio — and trusted them to do their jobs, team staffers say Fisher provided no clear direction on how people were supposed to operate.

“We had no idea what was going on or when we were off,” the former A&M recruiting staffer said. “He could take his private jet and go back home to see his kids or wherever, and we’re sitting there like, ‘Well, shoot, now we have the weekend off, didn’t know about that because Jimbo didn’t care to tell us.’”

Fisher kept a tight circle, confiding mostly in his right-hand man, director of football operations Mark Robinson, and receivers coach Dameyune Craig. But the buck stopped with Fisher and processes often bottlenecked as a result.

“He was the only one who could make a decision,” the athletic department staffer said. “Nobody else was empowered to make a decision.”

The chaos trickled down to the roster. Although disciplinary measures for those 2022 freshmen became public, multiple people within the program described poor day-to-day discipline and accountability for players toward the end of the Fisher era. Being late to meetings or workouts was met with few, if any, consequences.

“It was kids doing whatever they wanted,” the former assistant said. “And Jimbo showed a little leniency to those kids. Then, the older kids on the team were saying, ‘When we were kids on the team, you didn’t let us do it that way.’ It wasn’t good.”

After those 2022 recruits left the program, discipline improved in 2023. But the on-field issues persisted. Quarterback Conner Weigman’s season-ending injury in September was a major blow. The offensive line struggled more than ever. A&M’s special teams allowed three touchdown returns and was one of the worst units nationally in kickoff coverage (Fisher didn’t have a full-time on-field assistant dedicated to special teams).

A 15-point road loss to Miami in Week 2 foreshadowed issues that lingered. One-score losses to Alabama, Tennessee and Ole Miss left fans and school leadership frustrated. “Our program is stuck in neutral,” Bjork said the day A&M fired Fisher.

Over time, the dysfunction took its toll. Despite having top-10 roster talent each of the past three seasons, A&M went 19-15 overall, 10-13 against SEC teams and 12-14 against Power 5 competition under Fisher from 2021 to ’23. That included seven consecutive losses in games decided by one score and a nine-game road losing streak. The athletic department staffer called football the worst-run sport in A&M’s athletic department.

“It seems like things were just really hard,” Bjork told The Athletic. “And look, winning is hard, I get it. But processes and procedures should not be hard.”

A Week 2 loss to Miami this September put a concerning ceiling on Fisher’s sixth season. (Sam Navarro / USA Today)
So where does Texas A&M go from here?

The administration is more than a week into a wide-ranging coaching search. The sooner A&M can get someone in place, the better. Bjork set the opening day of the winter transfer portal window, Dec. 4, as an informal deadline to give the new coach a chance to retain as much of the roster as possible.

Several names have been connected to the A&M job. Mike Elko, who is only the second coach to take Duke to consecutive bowl appearances, seems like a natural fit given his previous experience with A&M as Fisher’s defensive coordinator.

UTSA coach Jeff Traylor, who has taken the Roadrunners to consecutive conference championships and has them in the mix for a third, would provide a Texas-heavy identity given his background as a former state championship-winning high school coach in the state. Kansas coach Lance Leipold’s work pulling the Jayhawks from the ashes would give the Aggies a builder. Arizona coach Jedd Fisch’s varied background includes extensive NFL experience coupled with his revival of the Wildcats, who went winless the season before he took over.

Bjork has specific traits he’s seeking in the next coach. Among the dozen attributes he listed, phrases like “supreme organizational skills,” a “culture of discipline” and someone who “can capitalize on modern day college athletics” stand out given Fisher’s shortcomings.

This time, there will be no plaques, no 10-year guaranteed contracts. The hire will be more grounded in reality. But the Aggies won’t change their lofty ambitions. If they can keep their loaded roster together, they should.

“Expectations should be sky-high there, because of the resources they have,” the former assistant said. “That school deserved way more than what we gave them the last few years.”

The Fisher hire proved that it’s not as simple as pairing a big-time coach with a ton of resources. There are no shortcuts to a championship. Texas A&M must find its man to build the program without skipping steps.

“The ingredients for a championship are here,” Bjork said. “Aggies want to do it the right way and deserve excellence in everything that we do.”

 

That article, while only confirming what we knew, proves Jimbo was and is the man for the job. His stubbornness, obliviousness, and unwillingness to listen to anyone else are all hallmark traits of aggies throughout history.
 

Hopefully they’ll re-sign him to a 20 year $300MM contract. Whoop!

[Tex Pete 20,399]

Just now, nnm said:

How much more foolish does Looch look now in defending this jackass for 6 years?

Liucci can’t look like anymore of a jackass than he always does. He’ll say anything that allows him access, input, “stature,” and an ability to continue recruiting for them. 

[Elmer_Fudd 22,281]

Daelyn Evans is visiting Florida this weekend.

[Deej 76,830]

Jimbo just taking off for a few days in his private jet and not communicating with his staff is hilarious. 

 

Edited November 24, 2023 by Deej

[Getafix 28,682]

 

 

(The one MINOR glitch in said plan ... evidently, this:

"A&M decided that Fisher would not allow them to implement this plan due to his inability to win games on the field")

 

Plan 2024 alive and well when it comes to Texas A&M football

Tarp (Aggie 247)

 

Spoiler

 

Plan 2024 alive and well when it comes to Texas A&M football

Tarp (Aggie 247)
 

As of a few weeks ago, Texas A&M’s plan was as follows:

- Take advantage of a favorable schedule next season that excluded Alabama and Georgia and featured the program’s toughest games at home.

- Beat Texas in 2024 and make a run at the College Football Playoff

- Keep Aggies’ boss Jimbo Fisher around so that they could keep the roster together and in particular the 2022 recruiting class on campus

- The opportunity cost of any type of buyout of Fisher could be better served by putting it towards improvements in the program and in particular NIL funding to help keep the roster and also eventually toward the 2024 recruiting class after they got on campus.

However, the flaw in this plan turned out to be Fisher himself. He continued to lose football games despite being given everything he wanted and displayed no signs that he would change the way he did business.

Ultimately, A&M decided that Fisher would not allow them to implement this plan due to his inability to win games on the field (something that most other people had decided a long time before this). This was even though it was expensive to part ways with him and that money could have used in other ways to shore up the team or that keeping the roster and recruiting class together became less likely and more of an issue.

Thus, Plan 2024 as I like to call it was modified as follows:

Switch out Fisher for another head coach and staff while keeping assistant head coach Elijah Robinson on hand to maintain as much of the roster and recruiting class as possible with an assistant where permitted from NIL.

That’s it.

In other words, A&M still has the same sense of urgency towards 2024 that it had before which means winning big next season and beating Texas.

That means that A&M wants the new head coach is going to have to do the things that Jimbo Fisher couldn’t, namely develop talent and manage games well enough to win the contests that Fisher is perceived to have let slip away.

Otherwise, A&M wouldn’t have earmarked the money it did towards removing Fisher.

The talent is thought to be there to accomplish all of A&M’s goals for 2024. The coach was not.

Thus, the new boss of A&M football is going to have to hit the ground running. They may be bringing in new systems both on and off the field and new personnel to implement them. However, even with a new coach, 2024 is not supposed to be a rebuilding year.

I’m not even sure if I would characterize the intention to change things up as reloading.

It’s going to have to be as painless of a transition as possible with key members of the roster being on board with the new guy (via an assist from Robinson). That’s because A&M doesn’t think that there are many rosters in college football more talented than what it has.

The person coming in is going to be attracted to the job by the talent on hand but there is also going to have to be a perception on their end that the best parts of the roster remain intact in the off season to allow them to win big in 2024. There’s also going to have to be the perception that they’re going to have the resources to add to it and have a more complete group than what we witnessed in 2023.

So if you’re looking for a new A&M football boss, all of those things are going to have to be in play on their end as well as A&M’s end.

2024 remains now of never for A&M football.

As a result, the person who A&M thinks can deliver on 2024 will probably be the one to replace Fisher because the next hire has no tomorrow beyond next season…and that’s because the people who actively wanted to or conceded that he needed to go probably won’t have much of a future beyond 2024 either if things don’t go according to plan.

 

 

 

[Deej 76,830]

That sign him to a ridiculous contract that paid him every dime no matter what happened, and he mailed it in. Shocking. He probably made that decision when he stepped off the plane in CS that first time.

 

[nnm 36,439]

34 minutes ago, Getafix said:

I’m not even sure if I would characterize the intention to change things up as reloading.

Firing Fisher is just reloading, y’all. 

[Vertigo 20,290]

35 minutes ago, Getafix said:

As a result, the person who A&M thinks can deliver on 2024 will probably be the one to replace Fisher because the next hire has no tomorrow beyond next season…and that’s because the people who actively wanted to or conceded that he needed to go probably won’t have much of a future beyond 2024 either if things don’t go according to plan.

This line of thinking truly baffles me. 

[Hornlover 8,830]

47 minutes ago, Getafix said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Plan 2024 alive and well when it comes to Texas A&M football

Tarp (Aggie 247)
 

As of a few weeks ago, Texas A&M’s plan was as follows:

- Take advantage of a favorable schedule next season that excluded Alabama and Georgia and featured the program’s toughest games at home.

- Beat Texas in 2024 and make a run at the College Football Playoff

- Keep Aggies’ boss Jimbo Fisher around so that they could keep the roster together and in particular the 2022 recruiting class on campus

- The opportunity cost of any type of buyout of Fisher could be better served by putting it towards improvements in the program and in particular NIL funding to help keep the roster and also eventually toward the 2024 recruiting class after they got on campus.

However, the flaw in this plan turned out to be Fisher himself. He continued to lose football games despite being given everything he wanted and displayed no signs that he would change the way he did business.

Ultimately, A&M decided that Fisher would not allow them to implement this plan due to his inability to win games on the field (something that most other people had decided a long time before this). This was even though it was expensive to part ways with him and that money could have used in other ways to shore up the team or that keeping the roster and recruiting class together became less likely and more of an issue.

Thus, Plan 2024 as I like to call it was modified as follows:

Switch out Fisher for another head coach and staff while keeping assistant head coach Elijah Robinson on hand to maintain as much of the roster and recruiting class as possible with an assistant where permitted from NIL.

That’s it.

In other words, A&M still has the same sense of urgency towards 2024 that it had before which means winning big next season and beating Texas.

That means that A&M wants the new head coach is going to have to do the things that Jimbo Fisher couldn’t, namely develop talent and manage games well enough to win the contests that Fisher is perceived to have let slip away.

Otherwise, A&M wouldn’t have earmarked the money it did towards removing Fisher.

The talent is thought to be there to accomplish all of A&M’s goals for 2024. The coach was not.

Thus, the new boss of A&M football is going to have to hit the ground running. They may be bringing in new systems both on and off the field and new personnel to implement them. However, even with a new coach, 2024 is not supposed to be a rebuilding year.

I’m not even sure if I would characterize the intention to change things up as reloading.

It’s going to have to be as painless of a transition as possible with key members of the roster being on board with the new guy (via an assist from Robinson). That’s because A&M doesn’t think that there are many rosters in college football more talented than what it has.

The person coming in is going to be attracted to the job by the talent on hand but there is also going to have to be a perception on their end that the best parts of the roster remain intact in the off season to allow them to win big in 2024. There’s also going to have to be the perception that they’re going to have the resources to add to it and have a more complete group than what we witnessed in 2023.

So if you’re looking for a new A&M football boss, all of those things are going to have to be in play on their end as well as A&M’s end.

2024 remains now of never for A&M football.

As a result, the person who A&M thinks can deliver on 2024 will probably be the one to replace Fisher because the next hire has no tomorrow beyond next season…and that’s because the people who actively wanted to or conceded that he needed to go probably won’t have much of a future beyond 2024 either if things don’t go according to plan.

 

As a result, the person who A&M thinks can deliver on 2024 will probably be the one to replace Fisher because the next hire has no tomorrow beyond next season…and that’s because the people who actively wanted to or conceded that he needed to go probably won’t have much of a future beyond 2024 either if things don’t go according to plan.

This mangling of the English language truly baffles me.

[Navin R. Johnson 706]

So the new coach will be expected to win big in year one, despite a dysfunctional roster and coaching staff, and complete lack of discipline? 

[Thetexashammer 1,062]

Hey guys, their secret plan is to win it all next year.  

[Dbeasy 15,068]

1 hour ago, Getafix said:

 

 

(The one MINOR glitch in said plan ... evidently, this:

"A&M decided that Fisher would not allow them to implement this plan due to his inability to win games on the field")

 

Plan 2024 alive and well when it comes to Texas A&M football

Tarp (Aggie 247)

 

  Hide contents

 

Plan 2024 alive and well when it comes to Texas A&M football

Tarp (Aggie 247)
 

As of a few weeks ago, Texas A&M’s plan was as follows:

- Take advantage of a favorable schedule next season that excluded Alabama and Georgia and featured the program’s toughest games at home.

- Beat Texas in 2024 and make a run at the College Football Playoff

- Keep Aggies’ boss Jimbo Fisher around so that they could keep the roster together and in particular the 2022 recruiting class on campus

- The opportunity cost of any type of buyout of Fisher could be better served by putting it towards improvements in the program and in particular NIL funding to help keep the roster and also eventually toward the 2024 recruiting class after they got on campus.

However, the flaw in this plan turned out to be Fisher himself. He continued to lose football games despite being given everything he wanted and displayed no signs that he would change the way he did business.

Ultimately, A&M decided that Fisher would not allow them to implement this plan due to his inability to win games on the field (something that most other people had decided a long time before this). This was even though it was expensive to part ways with him and that money could have used in other ways to shore up the team or that keeping the roster and recruiting class together became less likely and more of an issue.

Thus, Plan 2024 as I like to call it was modified as follows:

Switch out Fisher for another head coach and staff while keeping assistant head coach Elijah Robinson on hand to maintain as much of the roster and recruiting class as possible with an assistant where permitted from NIL.

That’s it.

In other words, A&M still has the same sense of urgency towards 2024 that it had before which means winning big next season and beating Texas.

That means that A&M wants the new head coach is going to have to do the things that Jimbo Fisher couldn’t, namely develop talent and manage games well enough to win the contests that Fisher is perceived to have let slip away.

Otherwise, A&M wouldn’t have earmarked the money it did towards removing Fisher.

The talent is thought to be there to accomplish all of A&M’s goals for 2024. The coach was not.

Thus, the new boss of A&M football is going to have to hit the ground running. They may be bringing in new systems both on and off the field and new personnel to implement them. However, even with a new coach, 2024 is not supposed to be a rebuilding year.

I’m not even sure if I would characterize the intention to change things up as reloading.

It’s going to have to be as painless of a transition as possible with key members of the roster being on board with the new guy (via an assist from Robinson). That’s because A&M doesn’t think that there are many rosters in college football more talented than what it has.

The person coming in is going to be attracted to the job by the talent on hand but there is also going to have to be a perception on their end that the best parts of the roster remain intact in the off season to allow them to win big in 2024. There’s also going to have to be the perception that they’re going to have the resources to add to it and have a more complete group than what we witnessed in 2023.

So if you’re looking for a new A&M football boss, all of those things are going to have to be in play on their end as well as A&M’s end.

2024 remains now of never for A&M football.

As a result, the person who A&M thinks can deliver on 2024 will probably be the one to replace Fisher because the next hire has no tomorrow beyond next season…and that’s because the people who actively wanted to or conceded that he needed to go probably won’t have much of a future beyond 2024 either if things don’t go according to plan.

 

 

 

Now this is a pretty big coincidence, because I also happen to have a plan for 2024, to be the President of the United States, except I have no skills, support or ambition to be President. But other than that, it’s my plan. 

[Vermin 3,049]

Quote

However, even with a new coach, 2024 is not supposed to be a rebuilding year.

✍️

[Getafix 28,682]

 

Hoo, boy ... this is about Lane Kiffin & Texas A&M.

Said earnestly, without a hint of irony or facetiousness.

 

 

 

[Henry Hill 3,156]

[nnm 36,439]

21 minutes ago, Dbeasy said:

Now this is a pretty big coincidence, because I also happen to have a plan for 2024, to be the President of the United States, except I have no skills, support or ambition to be President. But other than that, it’s my plan. 

You’d have my vote over the current front runners. 

[Tex Pete 20,399]

45 minutes ago, Navin R. Johnson said:

So the new coach will be expected to win big in year one, despite a dysfunctional roster and coaching staff, and complete lack of discipline? 

The next coach is set up. 
 

[TexasRenegade 2,449]

4 hours ago, Teryor said:

The Athletic: Jimbo Fisher’s failures left Texas A&M well short of national championship dreams

Featuring this awesome quote, which I'm not sure if 247 should take as them having the best rankings or being poor talent evaluators

  Reveal hidden contents

When Texas A&M hired Fisher in December 2017, it was widely considered a coup. Two months later, Texas A&M System chancellor John Sharp handed him a plaque proclaiming a future national title with the date unfilled. At FSU, Fisher went 83-23, led the Seminoles to a BCS national championship and a College Football Playoff appearance.

The fast-talking West Virginia native admired A&M’s top-notch resources. The Aggies had a top-10 athletic budget, spent half a billion dollars on facility renovations, had given their previous coach a massive contract, had unparalleled fan support and resided in a recruiting hotbed. He trusted then-A&M athletic director Scott Woodward, whom he’d known since his LSU days. The program checked a lot of boxes, except championships: The Aggies won their last conference title in 1998 and their last national championship in 1939.

Fisher, who knew how to win, was the missing piece, or so the Aggies thought. After giving Fisher a 10-year, $75 million contract, Sharp told the Houston Chronicle that his only concern with the length of the contract was that he couldn’t get Fisher to agree to a 15-year deal.

Looking back, Fisher’s best days were behind him.

“Jimbo lost his fastball,” a former Texas A&M staffer said. “He was hungry and motivated at FSU. Then he started reading his press clippings.”

The downfall wasn’t immediate. In Fisher’s first year, the Aggies went 9-4 and beat LSU for the first time since joining the SEC. He ensured every staff member received a game ball to commemorate the historic seven-overtime victory.

In year three, A&M had its best season of the Fisher era. The Aggies went 9-1 in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign, winning the Orange Bowl and finishing fourth in the Associated Press poll, their highest postseason ranking in 81 years. He elevated recruiting and stockpiled the roster with elite talent. In a postgame victory speech at the Orange Bowl, Fisher proclaimed, “We ain’t done yet.”

In September 2021, Fisher signed a contract extension for 10 years and nearly $95 million guaranteed. A month later, Fisher scored the landmark victory of his tenure, a 41-38 upset of No. 1 Alabama. That winter, A&M signed the highest-rated recruiting class of the modern era. On signing day, Fisher — while denying accusations that A&M bought the class — vowed, “If you don’t like that we’re coming on, get used to it. I ain’t going nowhere.”

go-deeper
GO DEEPER

Jimbo Fisher triggered by accusations of NIL slush fund: Calls rumors ‘garbage’ and ‘irresponsible as hell’

But as the program peaked, cracks in the foundation began to show. None were more visible than A&M’s decline on offense, which was supposed to be Fisher’s specialty.

The Aggies lost quarterbacks to season-ending injuries three years in a row. Offensive line play deteriorated. Fisher, who was the primary play caller and handled the offensive game plan, evolved slowly.

“Jimbo’s scheme was antiquated in 2014 when he won a national championship at Florida State,” an opposing SEC staffer said. “It was kind of out-of-date then, and it’s just not gotten better in 10 years.”

The Aggies failed to score 30 points against FBS opponents in 13 consecutive games from November 2021 to November 2022. Calls from fans and critics for Fisher to ditch play calling and hire a true offensive coordinator grew louder as the Aggies stumbled to a losing record. Despite his defiant tone after the win over LSU, Fisher relented after the season, hiring former Arkansas and Louisville head coach Bobby Petrino.

In August, Petrino called the offensive installation “a collective effort” but said he would handle play-calling duties. Bjork confirmed Petrino did call the plays this season, but three athletic department sources said Petrino didn’t have full offensive control and that he called plays primarily from Fisher’s offensive scheme.

So why hire Petrino or a coordinator at all?

“He felt like he had to, just for perception,” the athletic department staffer said. “His ego would never allow him to (relinquish offensive control). He wants to prove to everybody, ‘See, my scheme works.’”

Said Bjork to The Athletic, “My job was to say, ‘Coach, we’ve talked about an OC. Now’s the time. You’ve said it. We all agree. We’re going to turn it loose.’ And however it worked after that, that was up to them.”

Five people in or close to the program described Fisher as stubborn. If something worked at FSU in 2013, Fisher’s belief was that it would work at Texas A&M. Suggestions to do things differently weren’t often well-received.

“He liked confirmation,” a former A&M assistant said. “Sometimes the coaches would just say whatever they thought he wanted to hear because they’d be burned out in meetings. … You knew he was gonna do whatever he wanted to do anyways.”

Said the former A&M staffer, “If you told him ‘no,’ or something he didn’t want to hear, he would talk s— about you, like a little kid or something.”

Fisher’s contract armed him with immense power. The athletic department staffer said Fisher made it known he could get others fired: “He would say, ‘I’ve got the stick, and I’ll use it.’”

The offense received the bulk of Fisher’s attention. A lot of a team’s shortcomings can be papered over by a great quarterback, and Fisher understood that. Jameis Winston, Christian Ponder, EJ Manuel and JaMarcus Russell became first-round picks under his direction at Florida State and LSU. Fisher, who played quarterback at Samford, was also hardest on his quarterbacks.

“He’d dog-cuss QBs,” a former personnel staffer said. “I’ve never seen a dude tear up a young quarterback like Jimbo did.”

Despite his early success with FSU QBs, he later struggled to develop his quarterback recruits into stars. Since Winston, not a single Fisher high school quarterback recruit has finished his career as the starter at the school to which Fisher recruited him. At Texas A&M, the only quarterback that started and finished consecutive seasons under Fisher is one he didn’t recruit: Kellen Mond.

Jimbo Fisher’s high school QB signees since Jameis Winston

John Franklin III
2013, FSU
Transferred after 2 seasons
JJ Cosentino
2014, FSU
30 career attempts, no starts in 4 years
Deondre Francois
2015, FSU
Transferred after 4 seasons
De’Andre Johnson
2016, FSU
Dismissed
Malik Henry
2016, FSU
Transferred in first season
Bailey Hockman
2017, FSU
Transferred after 1 season
James Blackman
2017, FSU
Transferred after 4 seasons
James Foster
2018, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Zach Calzada
2019, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Haynes King
2020, Texas A&M
Transferred after 3 seasons
Eli Stowers
2021, Texas A&M
Transferred after 2 seasons
Conner Weigman
2022, Texas A&M
Sophomore at Texas A&M
Marcel Reed
2023, Texas A&M
Freshman at Texas A&M
A former A&M recruiting staffer pointed to mechanics and how Fisher instructs quarterbacks to hold the ball as a hindrance, citing the case of Haynes King, a former four-star recruit who transferred to Georgia Tech last winter and has been more successful there than he was at A&M. King’s personal quarterback trainer told 247Sports in October that King’s throwing motion had become elongated.

“If you watch film, you’ll see Haynes King is holding the ball really, really high at a certain location,” the former recruiting staffer said. “Now you see Haynes King playing free and open. … (Fisher) tries to mold them in a certain way … it may have worked in the ’90s when he was at Samford, but these kids these days? They want to play more like Patrick Mahomes. They want to play free.”

The development issues weren’t exclusive to quarterback. The offensive line, despite having two freshman All-Americans in 2021, has regressed, ranking last in the SEC in pressure rate allowed in three consecutive seasons, according to TruMedia. Fisher hasn’t had a 1,000-yard receiver since 2014, and none of his wide receiver recruits at A&M have turned into NFL Draft picks.

“We played them last year, and we were like, ‘Holy s—.’ There was first-round talent across the defensive line, the entire two-deep,” the SEC staffer said. “And then you play them this year and it’s like, ‘They’re still really good, but it felt like we played the exact same team last year.’ Are these guys really developing?”

The recruiting department is symbolic of how Fisher handled things. During his first fall at A&M, he walked into the bullpen where recruiting staffers worked and told them recruiting would take care of itself. “If you win games, you will land good recruits,” Fisher said, according to the former personnel staffer. “If you lose games, you will not land good recruits.”

That simplistic view isn’t entirely off base, but as roster management evolved, the need for an efficient, well-run recruiting department, led by a director of player personnel or general manager running the operation as the head coach’s proxy, has grown more important.

There were no consistently scheduled days for the on-field coaching staff to watch recruiting film as a group, which is unusual, the personnel staffer said. The former A&M recruiting staffer bemoaned Fisher’s indifference to the details.

“We’d sometimes watch kids as an entire staff and provide them all this information that was never ingested,” the recruiting staffer said. “We’d have sheets upon sheets, and (Fisher) didn’t even care. He didn’t want to go over the itineraries for recruiting visits. Didn’t care.”

Fisher’s reluctance to evolve in certain player acquisition areas also became an issue. Before this year, he rarely utilized the transfer portal, signing only seven scholarship transfers in his first five seasons. He signed 10 before this season out of necessity because more than two dozen players from the 2022 team hit the transfer portal.

A&M endured constant turnover in its recruiting and personnel department. After signing the No. 1 class in 2022, much of that staff departed, including director of player personnel Marshall Malchow, who joined Dan Lanning at Oregon. Four months later, Fisher hired Kevin Mashack from Indiana to succeed Malchow but parted ways with him after a year. For the past five months, A&M hasn’t had a director of player personnel, a position filled at every other SEC program and every Power 5 program in Texas.

“That position is so, so important in today’s environment,” Bjork told The Athletic.

That A&M doesn’t have a player personnel director with the winter transfer portal window set to open on Dec. 4 is “alarming,” the former personnel staffer said.

While the recruiting department was an afterthought, Fisher was passionate about landing top players.

Fisher has always recruited high school prospects well. Of his 13 signing classes as a head coach, 10 ranked in the top 10 nationally. Former staffers lauded Fisher’s charisma with recruits and families and ability to form bonds with them. “Jimbo is a great closer,” the former A&M recruiting staffer said.

But the pursuit of the top-ranked 2022 class, which is the highest-rated in the modern era, became an obsession for Fisher and his staff, to the point that Fisher inquired about the 247Sports Class Calculator and how certain commits would affect A&M’s recruiting ranking. The former A&M recruiting staffer said Fisher ignored character questions if the recruits were five-star prospects.

“He’s like, ‘Nope, he’s a five-star, we wanna take him,’” the staffer said.

Multiple members of that signing class broke team rules that warranted suspensions. Seven members of the 2022 class transferred out after their first season, including all four who were suspended.

“It’s like we’ve collected the most talent possible but I don’t think it was really strategically done the way you’d build a roster,” the current team staffer said. “They were just acquiring talent. I don’t know how much of a team it was.”

That could apply to the staff as well. Although Fisher had three former head coaches on his staff — Petrino, defensive coordinator DJ Durkin and offensive line coach Steve Addazio — and trusted them to do their jobs, team staffers say Fisher provided no clear direction on how people were supposed to operate.

“We had no idea what was going on or when we were off,” the former A&M recruiting staffer said. “He could take his private jet and go back home to see his kids or wherever, and we’re sitting there like, ‘Well, shoot, now we have the weekend off, didn’t know about that because Jimbo didn’t care to tell us.’”

Fisher kept a tight circle, confiding mostly in his right-hand man, director of football operations Mark Robinson, and receivers coach Dameyune Craig. But the buck stopped with Fisher and processes often bottlenecked as a result.

“He was the only one who could make a decision,” the athletic department staffer said. “Nobody else was empowered to make a decision.”

The chaos trickled down to the roster. Although disciplinary measures for those 2022 freshmen became public, multiple people within the program described poor day-to-day discipline and accountability for players toward the end of the Fisher era. Being late to meetings or workouts was met with few, if any, consequences.

“It was kids doing whatever they wanted,” the former assistant said. “And Jimbo showed a little leniency to those kids. Then, the older kids on the team were saying, ‘When we were kids on the team, you didn’t let us do it that way.’ It wasn’t good.”

After those 2022 recruits left the program, discipline improved in 2023. But the on-field issues persisted. Quarterback Conner Weigman’s season-ending injury in September was a major blow. The offensive line struggled more than ever. A&M’s special teams allowed three touchdown returns and was one of the worst units nationally in kickoff coverage (Fisher didn’t have a full-time on-field assistant dedicated to special teams).

A 15-point road loss to Miami in Week 2 foreshadowed issues that lingered. One-score losses to Alabama, Tennessee and Ole Miss left fans and school leadership frustrated. “Our program is stuck in neutral,” Bjork said the day A&M fired Fisher.

Over time, the dysfunction took its toll. Despite having top-10 roster talent each of the past three seasons, A&M went 19-15 overall, 10-13 against SEC teams and 12-14 against Power 5 competition under Fisher from 2021 to ’23. That included seven consecutive losses in games decided by one score and a nine-game road losing streak. The athletic department staffer called football the worst-run sport in A&M’s athletic department.

“It seems like things were just really hard,” Bjork told The Athletic. “And look, winning is hard, I get it. But processes and procedures should not be hard.”

A Week 2 loss to Miami this September put a concerning ceiling on Fisher’s sixth season. (Sam Navarro / USA Today)
So where does Texas A&M go from here?

The administration is more than a week into a wide-ranging coaching search. The sooner A&M can get someone in place, the better. Bjork set the opening day of the winter transfer portal window, Dec. 4, as an informal deadline to give the new coach a chance to retain as much of the roster as possible.

Several names have been connected to the A&M job. Mike Elko, who is only the second coach to take Duke to consecutive bowl appearances, seems like a natural fit given his previous experience with A&M as Fisher’s defensive coordinator.

UTSA coach Jeff Traylor, who has taken the Roadrunners to consecutive conference championships and has them in the mix for a third, would provide a Texas-heavy identity given his background as a former state championship-winning high school coach in the state. Kansas coach Lance Leipold’s work pulling the Jayhawks from the ashes would give the Aggies a builder. Arizona coach Jedd Fisch’s varied background includes extensive NFL experience coupled with his revival of the Wildcats, who went winless the season before he took over.

Bjork has specific traits he’s seeking in the next coach. Among the dozen attributes he listed, phrases like “supreme organizational skills,” a “culture of discipline” and someone who “can capitalize on modern day college athletics” stand out given Fisher’s shortcomings.

This time, there will be no plaques, no 10-year guaranteed contracts. The hire will be more grounded in reality. But the Aggies won’t change their lofty ambitions. If they can keep their loaded roster together, they should.

“Expectations should be sky-high there, because of the resources they have,” the former assistant said. “That school deserved way more than what we gave them the last few years.”

The Fisher hire proved that it’s not as simple as pairing a big-time coach with a ton of resources. There are no shortcuts to a championship. Texas A&M must find its man to build the program without skipping steps.

“The ingredients for a championship are here,” Bjork said. “Aggies want to do it the right way and deserve excellence in everything that we do.”

 

Holy crap, A&M is going full on tar and feather smear campaign on Jimbo.  There is no way all this is coming out without people being told to talk to make it appear A&M had no choice....

 

 

I mean none of its surprising....but how much is coming out does shock me.  Everything Jimbo did wrong short of illegal player payments is getting fed to the press....

 

Bjork order a code red on Jimbo....

[SaucyJack 3,488]

44 minutes ago, Dbeasy said:

Now this is a pretty big coincidence, because I also happen to have a plan for 2024, to be the President of the United States, except I have no skills, support or ambition to be President. But other than that, it’s my plan. 

Do you think in the next two weeks or so that you could have a perception of being President.  That's really all that is needed from your end.

[RabidM 2,668]

If they're going in on Jimbo in the press, he better not know where their skeletons lie.