Texas A&M walked out of Missouri with another bruising SEC loss, and the timing makes the whole thing sting even more.
The Aggies were beaten 27-6 by No. 14 Missouri on Saturday, their third double-digit conference defeat of the season. For a team that entered 2025 as a College Football Playoff participant, the slide has been sharp and ugly, with Texas A&M now sitting at 3-3 overall and 1-3 in SEC play.
That record comes with real pressure attached. Texas A&M already has more losses than it had all of last season, and the road to bowl eligibility is getting narrow fast.
Games still remain against No. 6 Alabama, No.
15 Tennessee and No. 1 Texas, which means the Aggies may need to steal wins at South Carolina and Oklahoma just to get to six.
The bigger story, though, is how familiar this all feels in College Station. Fans have seen this movie before.
After the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, Texas A&M finished 9-1 and then handed Jimbo Fisher a 10-year, $90 million extension while he was already making $7.5 million per year. The results went the other way quickly: 8-4 in 2021, then 5-7 in 2022. Fisher was fired in November 2023 with two games left in the regular season.
Mike Elko replaced Fisher that same month, signing a seven-year, $49 million deal through 2029. Then, less than two years later, amid a CFP run, Texas A&M added two more years to the contract and increased his base salary by more than $4 million annually, putting Elko among “one of the five highest-paid coaches in college football,” per ESPN.
Saturday’s loss put more of the spotlight on Elko, and not in a good way. Quarterback Marcel Reed has slipped badly, and that showed against Missouri. He finished 19-of-39 for 187 yards with two interceptions.
NFL.com draft analyst Lance Zierlein also pointed to Reed’s broader slump over his last eight games, including Saturday’s outing through three quarters. During that stretch, Reed has averaged 5.8 yards per attempt while throwing six touchdowns and 10 interceptions.
The regression raises a fair question about how much of Reed’s earlier success came from former offensive coordinator Collin Klein, who left to become head coach at Kansas State last offseason.
Klein’s move has gone well so far. Kansas State is 3-1 under him and averaging 40.5 points per game, which ranked 19th in FBS entering Week 6. Quarterback Avery Johnson is also putting together his best season, completing 66.2 percent of his passes for 910 yards, seven touchdowns and two interceptions while adding 291 rushing yards and three scores on 30 carries.
For all the noise around Elko’s future, there’s one practical reason nobody in College Station is talking seriously about a change: Fisher’s buyout. He is owed $7.2 million per year through 2031, per The Athletic, which makes the idea of replacing Elko a nonstarter for now.
So the question is whether Texas A&M is in a new cycle of collapse or just living through the same old script. After Saturday, it sure looks a lot like the latter.
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