COLUMBIA, Mo. (KBTX) – For as long as head coach Mike Elko has been back at Texas A&M, safety Dalton Brooks has boasted of his accomplishments as a running back at Shiner High School, where he was a two-way player for the Comanches.
Elko, in an effort to jokingly wind up his defensive back, would say he didn’t believe him.
After Saturday’s No. 3 Texas A&M’s 38-17 win over No. 22 Missouri, Elko was forced to concede. Between a fumble recovery run at the end of the first half and a fake punt rush in the second half, Brooks racked up 76 total yards on the ground which led to an important 10 Aggie points in Memorial Stadium.
“I guess today I’ve probably got to to tell him I believe him… So, he’s a two way player I guess now,” Elko said with a grin.
Back in Shiner, the daughter of Comanche head coach Daniel Boedeker made sure to show the coach Brooks’ highlights form Saturday’s game. Nothing about the two standout plays, especially the explosive runs, came as a surprise to Boedeker.
“He’s one of the best,” he told KBTX of Brooks’ rushing ability after Saturday’s game. “It’s just natural talent with his vision, his feet. You know, I always said he plays offense like he plays defense. He’s just a very physical guy and has a knack for finding the open seam. Once he gets going, he has that burst of speed that, especially for us, that was some of the best I’ve seen.”
Brooks was recruited by college programs at both safety and running back. However, defense was always his first love, Boedeker said. Ultimately, it was former head coach Jimbo Fisher and his staff that sealed Brooks’ commitment to A&M as a safety.
“He was a safety, but there were a lot of times we moved him into the box to play some linebacker for us,” Boedeker said. “He would let me know the same thing — that he would have been the best linebacker we had, no doubt.”
As A&M’s offense struggled to find any consistency in the first half of the game, Brooks did the work for his teammates with a minute left in the second quarter. On third and 10 from the Missouri 42, Brooks and linebacker Daymion Sanford blitzed into the backfield with Tiger freshman quarterback Matt Zollers, making his first career start, in their sights. Sanford arrived first, throwing a shoulder into the quarterback’s torso at full speed. The hit knocked the ball out of Zollers’ hand, floating the fumble in the air 14 yards behind the line of scrimmage.
Two weeks prior, when the Aggies’ win over LSU at Tiger Stadium was still in the balance, Brooks allowed an errant Garrett Nussmeier throw to bounce off both of his hands and fall to the turf.
He was determined for history not to repeat itself Saturday.
“It kind of felt like I had to catch that one,” Brooks said. “After dropping my pick I almost had last week, kind of felt like I had to catch that one. So I just made sure I secured it.”
Twenty-six yards later, Brooks was pulled out of bounds by Missouri tight end Jude James a tantalizing two yards short of the end zone. Aggie running back EJ Smith finished the work a play later, giving A&M it’s first two-score lead of the game, 14-0.
“I hit home and I was surprised that he got the ball, because I looked up and I saw him running,” Sanford said of Brooks. “I didn’t know if the ball’s on the ground or if it’s in the air. I wanted him to go score.”
Heading into Saturday’s game, A&M was one of seven teams nationally to allow more than one blocked punt this season. An issue with the Aggie punt team has been exotic punt block formations opponents have used against them, which overloaded defenders on one side of the ball. Late in the third quarter, Missouri’s block left them vulnerable for a fake, Elko said.
During his days at Shiner, Brooks was ready to run a fake punt when called upon. However, in high school, Brooks stood much further back than the up-back position he held Saturday, as the Comanches’ punter.
Boedeker said they had a fake punt play in the hopper with Brooks running the ball, but never called it while he was in high school. Brooks threw in that, while he was in Shiner, the two-time state champion Comanches rarely punted the ball.
“Anytime you got into a crunch-time situation, you wanted the ball in his hands, because he was going to find a way to make something happen, just kind of like he did today,” Boedeker said of Brooks.
A&M’s direct-snap fake punt is a play that has been in the works for a long time, Brooks said. Throughout that time, he’s been more than ready to put it into action.
“I kind of expect them to run it every time, but you never know,” he said. “I mean, this time, I kind of saw the look and I was like, ‘Hey, we’ve got to run it. He was thinking about it and I was just like, ‘Run it. Run it Run it.’”
As Aggie punter Tyler White faked a snap over his head, Brooks accepted the ball into his hands. Cutting across the backfield, he turned the corner on the right side of the line and was off to the races. He didn’t encounter defenders until he was well into Missouri territory and was brought down at the Tiger 18.
Five plays later, A&M punter Randy Bond nailed a 32-yard field goal that put the game well out of reach with a 24-7 Aggie lead.
If anyone in Memorial Stadium, including Elko, was unaware of Brooks’ 6,200 rushing yards and 92 rushing touchdowns in three years at Shiner, Brooks opened their eyes with two key runs.
“I feel like he should have scored on both of them,” Aggie running back Rueben Owens II said. “Dalton in high school was a crazy, crazy running back, really good running back. I feel, plays like that, they change the momentum of the game.”
But, just like Elko, Owens wasn’t going to let Brooks end the day without a playful jab. After Owens was tracked down by a defender in A&M’s win over Mississippi State, ending the back’s run short of the end zone, Brooks let him know about it. Owens told him he got gassed.
“Today, I told him, ‘Dang, bro, you were supposed to score that,’” Owens said. “He was like, ‘I was tired.’”
“See?” Owens retorted to Brooks, with a smile.
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