Fisher likely will be back next season
COLLEGE STATION — Nearly a decade after delivering a speech as a national championship coach at Florida State, Jimbo Fisher is making a pitch for his gig at Texas A&M.
“We have the talent to (win), and the kids have the heart,” Fisher pledged this week. “… Guys aren’t backing off; they’re still competing and being right there at one play (away). As long as you’re that close in that way and they have that look in their eyes, you can get there.”
Fisher, 58, speaks from experience having won a national title at FSU following the 2013 regular season. A&M snatched him from Tallahassee, Fla., four years later with the idea of the Aggies winning their first national title since 1939 by now.
They haven’t made the four-team College Football Playoff in Fisher’s five previous seasons at A&M, however, and won’t again this year after losing to Miami, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi in four of their first nine games.
Should the Aggies (5-4, 3-3 SEC) beat woebegone Mississippi State (4-5, 1-5) at Kyle Field on Saturday night as expected, beat Abilene Christian on Nov. 18 at Kyle and lose at LSU on Nov. 25 to wrap up the regular season, the home of the 12th Man will be 12-12 in the past two seasons.
That won’t cut it at a place that has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decade — including a half-billion dollar rebuild of Kyle Field eight years ago — to try and win titles, but there’s one big thing in the way of cutting the line with Fisher: his whopper of a contract.
Following this season, the Aggies will owe Fisher about $77 million on the eight years remaining on the guaranteed deal. Should A&M’s ballers and shot-callers somehow decide they’ve seen enough by December, the buyout would be nearly four times what Auburn paid Gus Malzahn to go away three years ago ($21 million), considered a gut punch of a buyout at that time.
A&M at least could claim one title out of the whole misadventure — most massive buyout shelled out by a landslide. It shapes up as to why, at least as of early November with three regularseason contests and a bowl game to go, Fisher is expected to earn at least one more year to try and right the titanic ship dubbed Texas A&M football.
“We’ve just got to find a way and once you do it — I’ve been there and you build slowly and you’ve went down and built back up — once you get over that hump and the guys can feel that, I think they’ll take off and I think we’ll … do it,” Fisher insisted. “I’ve been there before.”
His promise has some merit. The Aggies were 7-5 in the regular season in 2019, their second year under Fisher, before narrowly winning the Texas Bowl over Oklahoma State. The next year they finished 9-1 in a pandemic-tightened season, and their No. 4 final ranking in the Associated Press poll marked their highest finish since winning the national title in 1939.
The Aggies have gone a positively mediocre 18-15 in the three seasons since, but what separates Fisher from his predecessor Kevin Sumlin on that front — and Sumlin has a three-game lead over Fisher 69 games into their respective A&M swings — is Fisher continuing to recruit at a high level.
While Sumlin’s recruiting had dropped off late in his A&M tenure (201217), Fisher’s class of 2024 currently is ranked ninth via 247Sports.com despite the Aggies’ on-field woes. Fisher also landed A&M’s lone No. 1 class of the two-decade Internet era in 2022 — a haul that perhaps factors into why at this rate he’ll still be around in 2024.
The class, led by currently injured five-star quarterback Conner Weigman, will finally be upperclassmen (as juniors) with a couple of years of seasoning under their collective belts, and plenty of early playing time in a plethora of tight league games.
“Sometimes it’s like a young eagle on a cliff,” Fisher said of talented players earning game time, often only a few months removed from high school. “Sometimes mama has just got to push them off the cliff, and you’re scared if they can fly, but they take off.”
Those young birds have experienced their share of heartbreak over the past two seasons, including last year’s 5-7 finish, and the Aggies’ three SEC losses this season against Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi all have been by one score.
Their lone double-digit loss this season came in Week 2 in a non-conference contest at Miami, 48-33, before the defense developed into one of the SEC’s top units under second-year coordinator D.J. Durkin.
The A&M offense behind first-year coordinator Bobby Petrino showed plenty of life, too, against No. 10 Mississippi on Saturday in Oxford, Miss., in scoring four touchdowns (one of the Aggies’ five touchdowns occurred on special teams) in A&M’s 38-35 loss, and the Aggies’ three SEC losses have been by an average of 5.3 points.
As for 2024, the Aggies own their most favorable SEC schedule since joining the league in 2012 (for one, no Alabama for the first time since 2011), and they draw old rival Texas at Kyle Field in the Longhorns’ first foray into the SEC.
It adds up to Fisher, as of early November with life and game prognostications subject to change, earning another shot at A&M, while the Aggies hope to put that $77 million to better use than on an old coach — one giving national title speeches a decade ago at a previous perch.