In Death Valley, Mike Elko can turn Texas A&M’s lofty vision into a new reality

It’s officially opportunity season for college football’s big swingers.

Texas A&M coach Mike Elko can tell you all about that.

“Obviously a big opportunity, a big stage, a chance to go down to Baton Rouge for what will be a very big game and a hostile environment,” Elko said. “Another opportunity for this program to take a step forward.”

The Aggies (7-0, 4-0 SEC) have a sturdy College Football Playoff case. Their 85.2% chance to reach the postseason, per ESPN, is the fourth-highest in the country and the second-best in the conference. It’s a hardly unimpeachable measurement, though few are through just eight weeks in a regular season, and a stretch of three ranked opponents in their final five games leaves enough potential hurdles.

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Saturday’s game against No. 20 LSU (5-2, 2-2) at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, La. is the first of those three before dates with Missouri and Texas arrive next month. It represents both a chance to curry favor with the CFP committee and check another box off of the to-do list that Elko brought with him to College Station two years ago.

The Aggies would secure a second ranked road win if they beat the Tigers in a stadium that draws more than 100,000 fans per game on average. Only seven teams have multiple ranked wins this season and only Alabama — which has a nation-best four — has won multiple away from home.

Their strength of record, according to ESPN’s metrics, is already the best in the country. Eight of the top nine teams in that category reached the playoffs last season and the one that didn’t (BYU) was one of just three two-loss teams that didn’t make the cut. The Cougars’ signature regular season win was against an eventually unranked Kansas State early in the season at home last year. A win at Tiger Stadium for Texas A&M — where LSU is 103-17 since the 2010 season — carries a different kind of cache.

The Aggies just have to, y’know, do it.

On Monday, in Elko’s weekly news conference, he was asked about the “tough time” that the Aggies have had winning games in Baton Rouge since the two programs became league mates.

“By tough time,” Elko interrupted to say, “you mean we’ve never done it?”

The Aggies haven’t won a game at Tiger Stadium in 31 years and are winless in six games played there since they joined the Southeastern Conference more than a decade ago. Their last win at one of college football’s toughest stadiums — an 18-13 victory that started the 1994 season — happened so long ago that the venerable Sports Reference database doesn’t have complete statistics for that game.

Their last trip to Baton Rouge resulted in a 42-30 loss on Nov. 25, 2023. Elko was hired two days later to, as he described Monday, install a “vision of what this program should be” after years of unfulfilled expectations.

Consider Saturday’s trek east another part of that multi-step process that the Aggies must complete to further certify it. The season’s already been littered with them. They hadn’t beaten a ranked team on the road in over a decade before they effectively walked off Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. earlier this season. They hadn’t won seven consecutive games to start a season since the Southwest Conference still existed until they survived a scare vs. Arkansas Saturday night. They haven’t had a playoff-worthy résumé as strong as this one since the four-team format was first installed.

“The vision of this program has not been this program’s reality,” Elko said. “We’ve talked about that since I got here, that we can’t just keep saying we want to be something. We’re actually at some point going to have to go out and do it. That was gonna require us winning on the road, winning SEC games on the road, beating top-10 teams.”

Saturday, at a stadium which ESPN ranked as college football’s best venue prior to last season, an opportunity to seize reality awaits.

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