re: "College football's top 24 jobs" according to ESPN and fellow coaches..

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I was responding to an earlier poster justifying aTm's relevance. And yes it is about the past. These resources your team is relying on were there in the past just under utilized. With the exception of being a part of the SEC. So regards to the topic of the OP or the link in the OP, I see nothing to demonstrate that aTm is in the best position now or will be in the future. Unless being in the SEC currently is the Mecca of coaching.

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A&M didn't remotely have the resources in the past it does now. For instance when my Dad graduated in Bear Bryan't last year he had about 1000 folks in his class of that were all male and 95% were going in the military. This year A&M will graduated about 13k with less than 5% in the Corps of Cadets. A&M often had 1/2 the scholarship players of our rivals in the 50's and '60s and played buyout games with LSU in Baton Rouge. We didn't even become a University until the '60s, prior to that we were "The Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas" but by 2001 we joined the AAU and now we are the largest research University in the Southwest and largest in the SEC region. From the early '70s to the mid '80s A&M was the fastest growing college in the US going from about 10k students to 45k in about 15 years. Only in the last few years have those large classes hit prime donor age.

In spite of all of that, A&M won 18 Conference Titles and is a Top 15 All Time program. In the '80s through to the mid 90's we dominated, at one point winning 6 Conference Titles in 8 years and winning 90% of our home games (we lost 1 in my 4 years at A&M). We fell asleep at the wheel in the late '90s by letting our facilities go to hell and the combined hirings of Mack at Texas and Stoops at OU radically changing the landscape. We compounded that by making a horrific hire in Fran, who at the time was seen as the hottest coach in the US and of course was a complete disaster. So we kept building and investing and eventually made the SEC move.

We have never had facilities like we do now. Kyle has never been anything like it is going to be and we have never been in a place where we sold out a 102k stadium prior to the season starting. We've never had the volume of alumni support we have now. We have never been able to sell the SEC as the best conference to play in against playing in the Big 12 where our other Texas competition is floundering. The State of Texas has become an even bigger football factory than in the past and we are sitting on top.

So to act as though "A&M has always had those resources and hasn't utilized them" is at best naive and at worst moronic as a statement.