If Aggies are able to get their man, move would make an immediate major impact

What you are about to read might look foolish in five days.

In fact, depending on when you read this, and considering the speed of college coaching search developments, and factoring in the time required to upload words onto the internet or into a newspaper truck, there is a decent chance it already looks foolish right now.

But with those caveats out of the way, here is the premise: If everything goes according to plan, Texas A&M might be on the verge of its most substantial football moment in decades.

It’s bigger than joining the Southeastern Conference. It’s bigger than Johnny Manziel winning the Heisman Trophy. It’s bigger than any of the times the Aggies beat Texas.

If they really convince Jimbo Fisher to become their new head coach, they will have pulled off a feat with far-reaching consequences we only can begin to appreciate.

To be sure, the Aggies are gambling. If this does not work out, they will have to suffer the humiliation of becoming the latest victim in agent Jimmy Sexton’s never ending quest for leverage, and they probably will have to settle for a coach with weaker credentials than the man they just fired had.

And while it is easy for an outsider to look at Kevin Sumlin’s record — he’s one of only two A&M coaches in the last century never to have endured a .500 or losing season — and say he got a raw deal, it’s also easy to see why the Aggies took this risk.

They think they are better than Sumlin. History says they are wrong.

But Fisher can prove them right.

Instant credibility

Maybe you do not believe A&M is a top-10 job in college football. Maybe you mock the very idea that it is a better job than Florida State. But if Fisher makes the leap from the Seminoles, it instantly makes those claims credible.

It would be nothing short of a historic move. In the last 41 years, ever since Johnny Majors left Pittsburgh for Tennessee, his alma mater, no coach who has won a national championship has left that school directly for another college job. Guys like Steve Spurrier, Nick Saban and Urban Meyer wound up coaching elsewhere, but only after hiatuses in the NFL or the broadcast booth.

Fisher, for all intents and purposes, would be announcing to the college football world and to every recruit in the country that A&M is more desirable than the place where he won a national title and 83 games in eight years.

It is one thing for Aggies to brag about their facilities, their tradition and their potential. It’s quite another for someone like Fisher to do it. And if you do not think that someone like Texas coach Tom Herman is not rooting like crazy to avoid living-room recruiting faceoffs with a coach with that kind of resume, you are crazy.

Herman would not lose any sleep about having to outsell someone like Chad Morris. But Fisher? A coach like him could alter the landscape in a way Manziel’s success never quite did.

To be sure, Fisher would not guarantee anything simply by showing up in College Station. After all, he is 52, and he’s coming off the worst season of his career, and it might be that his best days are behind him for good.

But recent years have proven he remains a recruiting monster, and the potential associated with combining his Florida connections with new Texas turf has to be tantalizing for the Aggies.

Reason to gloat

Then there is the gloating factor. A&M’s two biggest rivals — Texas and LSU — both have made fools of themselves in recent years chasing championship coaches who kept evading their grasp. How sweet would it be for A&M to crow about landing its man after the Longhorns whiffed on Saban and the Tigers twice were jilted by Fisher?

Of course, the distinct possibility remains that the Aggies will be jilted, too. Although Fisher sure has sounded this week like a man not committed to his current job, that could be part of the act. He wants better compensation for his assistants, and he wants a better football infrastructure at Florida State, and pretending to entertain an A&M offer obviously would be a great way to get both.

Still, the Aggies have to play along. For all of their money and all of their passionate alumni, nobody can legitimize them the way Fisher can.

So they prepare their offer, and allow themselves to hope, knowing they might already look really foolish.