Elko welcomes NIL, transfer era while Saban balks
COLLEGE STATION — Texas A&M’s Mike Elko is just getting rolling as a head coach at the same time college football’s most iconic coach, Nick Saban, is getting out.
The differences in their attitudes toward an open transfer portal and NIL — college athletes benefitting from their names, images and likenesses over the past three years — is marked.
“Nowadays, you constantly have two eyes working, one on what is the best way to make sure I can stay the course and build this thing for the long term,” said Elko, in his first season with the Aggies after two seasons as Duke’s head coach. “While you’re also trying to plug and play some short-term solutions to make sure that I’m doing enough to give us a chance to be successful immediately.
“When we got to Duke (in late 2021) we were walking a real good balance of you have this transfer portal, but if you overload from the portal, at some point you’re going to wake up and not have a quality foundation. But if you don’t use the portal, you might not be able to compete as fast as you want to. You’re always looking in both directions now.”
Compare that approach to Saban, who retired from Alabama in January and was part of a roundtable discussion on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., organized by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Houston.
“All the things that I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exists in college athletics,” Saban told national lawmakers as part of the discussion. “It’s always been about developing players, about helping people be more successful in life.”
Of course Elko, 46, is in his third season as a head coach while Saban, 72, retired after winning a combined seven national titles at LSU (one) and Alabama (six). Saban first became a head coach at a major college (Michigan State) at age 43, four years after he’d spent a season as Toledo’s head coach in 1990.
Aggies at least can take heart in a consistently shifting college sports landscape they now have a relatively young head coach who says he embraces and readily adapts to change, whether it’s portal or NIL-related.
“If you look and since I went to Notre Dame, I think we’ve had instant impact success every year that I’ve taken over,” said Elko, who spent 2017 as Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator and then four seasons as A&M’s defensive coordinator prior to heading to Duke. “That first year at Notre Dame there was an immediate defensive turnaround, and my first year at Texas A&M there was an immediate defensive turnaround, and my first year at Duke there was an immediate turnaround.
“So I think maybe my track record has proven an ability to adapt to (change).”
Saban on Tuesday shared the story on Capitol Hill that his wife, Terry, wondered why the Sabans were still trying to “develop” young men in the NIL and portal era.
“We’d have all the recruits over on a Sunday with their parents for breakfast, and (Terry) would always meet with the mothers and talk about how she would impact their sons and they would be well taken care of,” Saban said. “She came to me right before I retired and said, ‘Why are we doing this? ’ I said, ‘What do you mean? ’
“She said, ‘All they care about is how much you’re going to pay them. They don’t care about how much you’re going to develop them, which is what we’ve always done. So why are we doing this? ’”
Elko signed 17 players in his first class at A&M and added 23 signees from the transfer portal for a total of 40 newcomers by this summer. Elko took over for the fired Jimbo Fisher, and the new coach described a “depleted roster” as a big reason why he went so heavy on the transfer portal this year.
“It’s probably a little bit of an anomaly,” Elko said. “Transition creates a lot of chaos, that’s just the nature of it. When you get here, you’re just trying to hold things together through transition as best you can. I think we did about as good as we possibly could have at that.”
Elko added that he’s adamant about not signing high school players “that you don’t think make a ton of sense for you in the long term.”
“Inevitably, that leaves you short, if you do it right,” he explained. “So then you’ve got to go fill that (void), and that forces you to probably go a little bit larger into the transfer portal than you would ever want to. I hope we never have a situation (again) where on January 2 I’m looking at the same type of depleted roster ever again in my life.
“But it was what it was this year and so you have to address it, and we were able to address it really well.”