Aggies’ resources were lure that hooked new AD
COLLEGE STATION – Before he teams up with Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M, incoming Aggies athletic director Ross Bjork will sit alongside former A&M coach R.C. Slocum at the Southeastern Conference spring meeting this week in Destin, Fla.
“R.C. is going to cast all of the votes for Texas A&M – he’s the athletic director until I start,” Bjork said of Slocum’s current interim post in running the Aggies’ athletic department. “But I can help him … and he can bounce perspective off of me this week.”
Slocum is just one of many A&M figures Bjork intends to absorb Aggies insight from in the coming weeks and months, after leaving the same job at fellow SEC West member Mississippi this month.
“Learn and listen – those are the first orders of business,” Bjork said Monday prior to the start of the SEC spring meetings. “And start building relationships.”
When Bjork spoke of Fisher, entering his second season at A&M, he spoke of winning titles. The Aggies haven’t won at least a league title since they were in the Big 12 in 1998 under Slocum. They entered the SEC in 2012 and finished second in the West Division last year under Fisher with a 9-4 record.
“This is a great opportunity to win championships, not just one but multiple,” Bjork said of joining forces with Fisher.
Bjork, 46, will officially be introduced on Monday at A&M, and start his new job in earnest in July when he moves his family from Oxford, Miss., to Bryan-College Station. So why leave one SEC West post for another?
“Ole Miss has been special to me and my family and I could have stayed there for a long, long time,” Bjork said. “But when you’re contacted by a topfive athletic department, where they have all of these resources, 500,000 former students, the only SEC program in the state of Texas – that’s a big platform.
“It gives you a chance to not only be a top five program, but grow. We can still improve. This was a nobrainer opportunity.”
Fisher, 53, was involved
in the hiring process, and Bjork said he visited with the second-year football coach along the way.
“It went great – he and I see things very similarly,” Bjork said. “I told him we’re cut from the same cloth, being small-college football players. We know what it takes in terms of hard work and the grinding mentality to get things done. The sky is the limit with our relationship.”
Bjork and Fisher did not have a prior relationship, outside of plenty of mutual
acquaintances and friends in the business. Bjork, a native of Kansas, played fullback at Emporia State University. Fisher played quarterback at Salem College and Samford University.
“He just wins, and wins at a high level,” Bjork said of Fisher, who won a national title at Florida State in 2013. “Knowing what it takes to win a championship – we’ve got the right guy, absolutely.”
Bjork said he did not have a prior relationship with new A&M basketball coach
Buzz Williams, either, outside of Williams pulling him aside in the tunnel after Virginia Tech, which Williams was coaching at the time, played at Mississippi in 2017.
“He said he was impressed with how we handled everything at Ole Miss during the challenges we had,” Bjork said of the Rebels dealing with the NCAA over football infractions under then-coach Hugh Freeze. “I was impressed that (Williams) had been paying attention during basketball season. I asked him why he was paying attention to this and he said, ‘I study leadership.’”
Bjork added, “He and I are going to hit it off the same way Jimbo and I have hit it off.”
As for baseball, Bjork said, “The A&M baseball program is one of the standard bearers in the SEC, no question. Coach (Rob) Childress does a great job just running the program the right way.”