As if we needed proof that things have changed for real - WSJ article

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Back in 2022, Texas A&M’s football team pulled off the impossible. With a nationwide sweep and aggressive pitch, the Aggies assembled the No. 1 recruiting class in the country for the first time in school history. They even beat Nick Saban’s Alabama, which had owned the top spot in nine of the previous 11 seasons.

Three years later, little evidence of that group remains in College Station, Texas.

Twenty-four of those 30 recruits are now gone, with many transferring in the wake of coach Jimbo Fisher’s firing.

The six who stuck around, however, are finally delivering on the promise that got them to A&M in the first place.None more so than the guy who traveled the furthest to be there.

Theo Melin Öhrström grew up closer to the Northern Lights than the Friday night lights of Texas high-school football. But the senior tight end from Stockholm is playing a major role in the No. 3 Aggies’ unbeaten start to the 2025 season. Öhrström has caught 11 passes for 73 yards this fall, though his numbers only begin to describe his value to the program. As one of the handful of players who stayed through Texas A&M’s tumultuous coaching transition—and the only one nicknamed “Thor”—he has helped coach Mike Elko execute a full-scale culture overhaul that has the Aggies at 7-0 for the first time since 1994.

“He saw the vision,” said Texas A&M recruiting general manager Derek Miller. “The guys who chose to stay through the transition, they’re thriving now.”

More surprising than Öhrström sticking around this long is that he wound up there at all. Growing up in Sweden, Öhrström started playing the other kind of football almost as soon as he could walk. He was a decent goalkeeper until he hit a growth spurt in middle school.

“I feel like my body just kind of outgrew me,” he said, “and I was having a hard time keeping up.” It was around this time that he stumbled across a YouTube video of Odell Beckham, Jr. performing trick shots with a group of A&M alums who make up the sports-comedy team Dude Perfect. On a subsequent family trip to California, he brought back a souvenir: a genuine American football. Before long, Öhrström was hooked and tuning in to follow a team 4,300 miles away in East Rutherford, N.J.

“When I was like 13 or 14 years old, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to watch the Giants in the prime-time games,” he said.

At 15, he was accepted to RIG Academy, a Swedish government-funded boarding school for aspiring athletes in Uppsala, north of Stockholm

“You could tell by the way he approached things that that’s a driven young dude that really wants to go places,” said RIG head coach Robert Johansson.

He then spent the summer before his senior year attending camps in the U.S. to garner interest from coaches, who viewed him as a potentially useful tight end, even though he’d never played a significant down of football in the U.S. His mother wasn’t thrilled by some of the places her son might land. But on his visit to College Station, he tried to reassure her: There was no way he’d end up in Texas.

“I genuinely thought it was just like cowboys and nothing and desert,” he said. 

That changed the moment he set eyes on Kyle Field, Texas A&M’s 103,000-seat cathedral of college football.

“It looks like a Coliseum,” Öhrström said. “I was like, ‘wow, this is pretty, pretty cool.’”

Things weren’t so rosy when Öhrström and his fellow recruits finally got to play there. The Aggies sputtered to 5-7 in their first season and the team was racked by disciplinary issues. Fisher was fired midway through the 2023 season at the cost of more than $76 million.

The environment was so toxic and Öhrström was so frustrated by how infrequently his number was called that he considered leaving. Elko and offensive coordinator Collin Klein convinced him to stay.

“In some cases with the old staff, they would overlook some character issues and stuff like that with guys just because they were good players,” Öhrström said. “Evidently that wasn’t the best way to go about things.”

The new way involved Elko completely overhauling the Aggies roster. They prioritized ”big people that move fast,” explained Miller, saving scholarship offers for players who were hungrier to improve than to become famous.

In other words, people like Öhrström. He’s motivated by the slim chance that he might one day catch passes in the NFL, Miller said, not by the riches on offer through NIL sponsorship deals.

Because of his European visa, Öhrström is the only Texas A&M starter who isn’t earning a cent.

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