Mike Elko didn’t have to be asked twice about the College Football Playoff’s possible jump to 24 teams.
At his Monday press conference, the Texas A&M coach weighed in on the expansion talk that has already sparked plenty of pushback around college football. The current CFP setup sits at 12 teams, but last week’s news pointed toward a bigger field with 24 berths, and the reaction from fans and media has leaned more negative than positive. The main concern is simple: if too many teams get in, what happens to the urgency late in the season?
Elko made his view clear with the kind of line coaches around the sport have been using for months.
"So much of college football is about those really meaningful games, and it doesn't take much to draw conclusions about what those games will look like. … You worry about where this thing could go as you see what Week 17 in the NFL is like."
That comparison is exactly what plenty of college football people don’t want. A slim minority may welcome an expanded playoff, but the broader fear is that the sport could drift toward the kind of late-season flatness that defines the NFL’s final week. Elko has been among the coaches standing against that idea, and he was in line with the SEC’s general resistance to the change.
For Texas A&M, the timing of the discussion comes in the middle of a season still hanging in the balance. The Aggies are 4-3 and 1-3 in the SEC after a 41-0 shutout of The Citadel, and their next test is a trip to Tuscaloosa to face No.
13 Alabama for the first time since 2022. That’s a brutal assignment, especially with the Crimson Tide coming off back-to-back losses to Georgia and Tennessee.
Still, this SEC season has already been full of wild results. Texas, Georgia, and Alabama all lost on the same day for the first time since 1996, and Texas A&M’s final five games all look manageable on paper: Alabama, then South Carolina on the road, Tennessee at home, Oklahoma on the road, and Texas at home.
The catch is obvious. Those games only look winnable if the Aggies can get better play from their offensive line and starting quarterback Marcel Reed.
Beyond the standings and the playoff debate, there’s also the practical reality of what expansion could mean for a coach like Elko. With Texas A&M’s financial advantage and the ability to reload through recruiting and the transfer portal every year, a bigger playoff could create a path to one of the seven SEC spots and potentially lengthen coaching tenures for programs built to keep retooling.
For now, though, the biggest immediate challenge is still the next one on the schedule: Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, in a season that has already delivered more surprises than anyone expected.
In Other News...
Texas A&M Just Took A Recruiting Hit Fans Will Notice
Texas A&M took a recruiting setback this week when four-star linebacker Aston Whiteside backed off his pledge and flipped to Miami after taking an official visit there. Whiteside had originally committed to the Aggies in June, so the move stings not just because of the talent involved, but because it comes from a prospect the staff had already landed once.
Even so, the loss does not knock Texas A&M off course in the bigger picture. The Aggies are still set up to finish with one of the top recruiting classes in the 2027 cycle, which is why this one feels more like a hit to momentum than a full-blown shift in the programs outlook. [Read more 🡒]
Kevin Sumlin Sees A New Problem Making Texas A&M Even Tougher
Since Kevin Sumlin left College Station in 2017, Texas A&M has cycled through coaches who have all had to navigate the same hard truth: building a true SEC contender there has never been simple. Now coaching the Dallas Renegades, Sumlin looked back on his time with the Aggies and the larger arc of the program, noting that the job has remained difficult even as the league around it has changed.
The added challenge, in Sumlins view, is that the road only gets steeper with Texas and Oklahoma entering the SEC. The Aggies have long had to fight history, expectation and a crowded recruiting battlefield, and Sumlin suggested the competitive gap has not narrowed much since he was in charge. For a program still chasing a breakthrough, the leagues next shift only raises the stakes. [Read more 🡒]
Texas A&Ms Alabama Trip Hinges On One Offensive Question
After rolling past The Citadel, Texas A&M now turns to one of the toughest road tests on its schedule, a trip to face No. 13 Alabama. The Aggies know the margin for error shrinks fast in games like this, and the way they move the ball on the ground could go a long way toward determining whether the offense stays on schedule or gets pushed into obvious passing situations.
Freshman KJ Edwards has become part of the conversation as Texas A&M looks for a steadier run game to keep Alabamas defense honest. If the Aggies can establish that early balance, it would give Marcel Reed a cleaner path to running the offense and keep Texas A&M from leaning too heavily on one phase against a defense built to punish predictability. [Read more 🡒]