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It seemed like Texas A&M was begging for disaster to strike when it agreed to give Jimbo Fisher a massive contract extension with a truly absurd buyout clause in 2021. It didn’t take long for that decision to come back and bite the Aggies, who agreed to pay him $76 million not to coach the team when he was fired after getting off to a 6-4 start this season.
The writing had been on the wall for a while, as plenty of people had already spent plenty of time speculating about who could replace Jimbo Fisher if he was given the boot. It came as no surprise that the College Football Media Industrial Complex kicked into high gear when his dismissal was finalized, as the internet was quickly flooded with theories about who will fill the void that formed at Texas A&M.
Elijah Robinson will serve as the interim head coach of the Aggies for the remainder of the season, and it seems pretty unlikely the program will announce a successor before the current college football campaign wraps up. Of course, we can expect to be treated to plenty of rumors concerning potential candidates for the position—and there’s apparently no limit to just how dumb they’re going to be.
There are plenty of people who’d kill to be the head coach at Texas A&M, an SEC school with a history stretching all the way back to 1894. There’s little doubt the Aggies will have trouble attracting plenty of potential replacements with promising résumés, and while there’s certainly a large pool of potential applicants, a laughable amount of attention has already been paid to people who have absolutely no business taking the job.
Take, for example, Deion Sanders, who made quite a name for himself at Jackson State before heading up to Boulder to coach at the University of Colorado. Coach Prime initially more than lived up to the hype he had a substantial hand in generating in the lead-up to the season, but that 3-0 start has been nullified with a brutal stretch of games where the Buffalos have gone 1-6.
There’s literally no reason to believe Texas A&M would even entertain the possibility of hiring Sanders, but he was nonetheless asked to address the rumors he quickly shut down after being asked about the prospect.
Sanders doesn’t have any previous ties to the Aggies, although the same can’t be said about Dan Campbell, who is currently well on his way to leading the Detroit Lions to the playoffs. Campbell was a tight end at Texas A&M in the 1990s before taking his talents to the NFL, and while it took him a little while to find his footing as a head coach in the league, he’s really come into his own this season.
There is literally no reason to believe there is any amount of money that could convince Campbell to leave Detroit for College Station, but CBS Sports nonetheless went out of its way to confirm he is not, in fact, a candidate for a job he’d need to be insane to have any interest in.
While I don’t want to put too much stake in the opinions of college football fans who spend way too much time on message boards and social media, there’s also currently no shortage of people out there who think the Aggies should try to go after Bill Belichick.
Based on how things are currently trending, I wouldn’t be shocked to see a national media outlet publish a story addressing that possibility by the end of the week.
Look, it’s only natural that people want to know who’s going to be the next coach at Texas A&M sooner rather than later, and at this point, I know it’s incredibly futile to try to tell college football fans to take a breath and let the process play out.
With that said, I would like to humbly ask this particular rumor mill to ramp down production for at least a few weeks.