COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Remember the Swagcopter?
In a different era of Texas A&M football, it was merely a way for Kevin Sumlin and his staff to hop from one high school game to another but became a symbol of the program’s largesse and ultimately its superficiality as the recruits it helped sign didn’t translate to enough wins.
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Remember the faux national championship trophy with a space left blank to fill in the year Jimbo Fisher and his groundbreaking $75 million contract were supposed to bring one back here?
It became, yet again, the emblem of a school trying to speak something into existence that nobody around here realized had to be earned rather than bought.
For its first dozen years in the Southeastern Conference, Texas A&M and its supporters would stand on their proverbial mountain of cash and shout to the masses how they had everything needed to win championships.
Now, as undefeated and third-ranked Texas A&M pushes for its first appearance in the College Football Playoff, it seems the Aggies finally have the one thing money can’t buy in this sport. After all the choreographed attempts to turn this program into an image of something it could never be, it took an accident to fill the void with the substance it needed most.
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“People always want to take the elevator to success,” said Mike Elko, the Jersey-born, Ivy League-educated 48-year-old head coach that Texas A&M never knew it needed. “That’s not really how it works for anybody. You want your program to be this but it’s actually that and there’s a slow and steady climb that gets you where you want to go. It’s not, ‘We’re going to hire this coach and he’s a magician and we got him in here and tomorrow we’re a national championship program.’ It doesn’t work that way anywhere.”
Texas A&M head coach Mike…
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