Texas A&M is riding a historic season of success the nation’s No. 7 overall seed into the 12-team College Football Playoff, which opens in less than two weeks.<\/p>\n
Second-year Aggies coach Mike Elko also is navigating staff transition as he prepares for a new offensive coordinator with incumbent play-caller Collin Klein set to take over at his alma mater, Kansas State.<\/p>\n
Success, inevitably, brings staff change.<\/p>\n
The Aggies are looking to fortify their offensive staff with an addition from a fellow Southeastern Conference program: Kentucky.<\/p>\n
Multiple sources tell FootballScoop that Derek Shay is in deep discussions to exit the Bluegrass to join Elko’s Texas A&M program. He is going to become the Aggies’s tight ends coach in January after strongly deliberating the opportunity to stay and become a part of Will Stein’s inaugural Kentucky staff.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It’s set to be a fourth SEC program for Shay, who also owns a previous stop as a senior offensive analyst at Missouri and work as an assistant tight ends coach at LSU.<\/p>\n
Shay also owns play-calling experience at a national high school, previously serving as the offensive coordinator at prep powerhouse IMG Academy for three seasons from 2017-19.<\/p>\n
Other stops include McNeese State and for then-head coach Charles Huff’s Marshall Thundering Herd in 2023.<\/p>\n
A former offensive lineman as an Football Championship Subdivision player at Western Illinois and Eastern Illinois, Shay also coached the offense at Indianapolis, Indiana, program Warren Central High School.<\/p>\n
The Aggies won their first 11 games in the 2025 season, scoring an early-season upset at Notre Dame in a 41-40 thrilled that helped propel Texas A&M to share of the SEC’s best regular-season record.<\/p>\n
Debuting at No. 3 in the CFP Top 25 last month and holding there for several weeks before a loss to rival Texas, the Aggies are set to host 10th-seeded Miami Dec. 20 at noon ET in the Playoffs’ opening round.<\/p>\n
Elko is also going through the process of finding a replacement for Klein at the top offensive assistant position. A former star quarterback at Kansas State, Klein helped Texas A&M to the nation’s No. 14 scoring offense at 36.3 points per game, touchdown-per-game increase; No. 20 in total offense at 454.4 ypg.<\/p>\n
In addition to a number of external candidates, current Aggies co-offensive coordinator and wide receivers coach Holmon Wiggins also is contention for the coordinator post.<\/p>\n
Wiggins was on staff at Alabama for the final five seasons of the Nick Saban era from 2019-23; he was the Tide’s assistant head coach of offense and also tutored their wide receivers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Texas A&M is riding a historic season of success the nation’s No. 7 overall seed into the 12-team…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[40027,40028,2163,223,27,40026,29,28],"class_list":["post-82915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-2025-college-football-playoff","tag-derek-shay","tag-mike-elko","tag-news","tag-texas","tag-texas-a-m-714","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}