Texas A&M football needs to realize there are some things money can't buy

As Texas A&M begins its search for a new football coach, buoyed by unbridled ambition and backed by a seemingly endless supply of cash, it will sell a vision of being the next Georgia-in-waiting. 

Maybe the 12th time is the charm.

History does not always predict the future in college sports, but as the Aggies get ready to do what they do best — recklessly spend money in pursuit of something that can’t really be bought — it's worth remembering something very important about Texas A&M and its relationship to football coaches. 

Jimbo Fisher, who was given a $77 million parting gift Sunday after going 27-21 in the Southeastern Conference, was the 11th straight coach at Texas A&M to leave in disappointment. 

Not all of them were as mediocre as Fisher. Not all of them were shoved aside solely for on-field performance. But since Bear Bryant walked away in 1957 to build his Alabama dynasty, the bottom line has been the same: A perfect, 11-for-11 record of coaches trying and failing to fulfill the promise of a program that hasn’t sniffed a national championship since college football was integrated. 

That is not a warning to any coach thinking about pursuing this job, because the money still spends in the end. And the past does not doom Texas A&M to forever lack what it wants most, because one coach can indeed change everything.

But in a world fueled by optimism over reality and purchasing power over fiscal sanity, the framing of Texas A&M as college football’s next superpower if it just gets the right guy — as Georgia did with Kirby Smart eight years ago — ignores two important pieces of context.

First, no two programs' burdens are the same. Second, and perhaps most relevant of all, the odds of hiring someone as capable as Smart are nearly as bad as spotting a unicorn in the middle of Kyle Field.

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The comparisons between Georgia in 2015 and Texas A&M in 2023 will continue over the next several weeks as one high-profile candidate after another gets linked to the Aggies. From a high-altitude view of the two situations, you can squint and kind of see why.

At the time, Georgia was considered the SEC’s perennial underachiever, always falling short in one way or another against Urban Meyer’s Florida or Nick Saban’s Alabama or even Steve Spurrier’s South Carolina on occasion. From the outside, it seemed like a real mystery how a program with so many natural advantages — the most important being the overwhelming amount of blue-chip talent located within the state’s borders — could go decades without breaking through. Even Georgia Tech found a way to sneak out half a national title in 1990, making the Yellow Jackets one of five historic rivals (including Clemson, Tennessee, Florida and Auburn) to win it all since Georgia’s last title in 1980. 

When the program finally decided to move on from Mark Richt after 15 seasons, Smart was the only candidate the school considered. A former Bulldog defensive back in the late 1990s, Smart had been attached to Nick Saban as an assistant coach going back to 2004 at LSU, eventually winding up as his defensive coordinator through four Alabama national title runs. 

Though Smart was obviously ready to be a head coach, I was unsure at the time that he was the best candidate Georgia could get, largely because the track record of Saban assistants replicating his famous “process” elsewhere had been poor.

Also, college football at the time was in the midst of a stylistic revolution where up-tempo, spread offenses were regularly getting the better of even the best defenses — Alabama’s included. In Smart's final game as the Crimson Tide’s defensive coordinator, Alabama gave up 40 points and 550 yards to Clemson and won anyway. An aggressive offensive mind seemed like a safer bet. 

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Needless to say, I was very, very wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. So wrong that in more than a decade of writing frequently about college football, it’s probably the opinion I’d most like to have back. Under Smart, Georgia has won the last two national titles and should probably be favored at this point to make it three in a row for the first time in the modern era of college football. With one hire, Georgia went from the sport’s most-frustrating program to arguably as good as anybody has ever been. 

That obviously speaks to the rarity of Smart’s coaching and program-building talent, but when you look under the surface at what changed in Athens, there's really nothing that Texas A&M or anybody else can replicate. 

In the fall of 2015, as the 4-0 Bulldogs prepared to face what looked like a wobbly Alabama, I did a deep dive into the culture at Georgia. The broad takeaways centered on Georgia handling discipline for off-field issues more aggressively than its competitors, and the school's insistence on not borrowing money or deficit-spending to fund facilities, which had fallen way behind the rest of the SEC.

Greg McGarity, the athletics director at the time, told me: “Facilities are very important, but it's not the end-all.” A former member of the Georgia Board of Regents and prominent booster said: “I'm not willing to sell my soul to the devil just to say we won. There's a certain pride, without being condescending, where we try to hold ourselves to a higher standard." 

'The Georgia Way'

This had become known as "The Georgia Way,” which was essentially a mentality that it would be almost embarrassing if Georgia went to the same lengths as Alabama to be good at football. That sounded nice, but here's what it meant: In Richt’s final year — not that long ago — Georgia would sometimes bus its team an hour each way to the Atlanta Falcons’ indoor practice facility in Flowery Branch to practice during severe weather because it did not have a suitable place on campus. A few years earlier, Richt unknowingly broke a minor NCAA rule by paying some assistant coach about $60,000 in bonuses out of his own pocket because he believed they weren't being compensated fairly.

In other words, Georgia was trying to beat Alabama while pretending it was in the Ivy League — and came darn close to doing it. That’s how high the Georgia program’s ceiling is. Despite operating with one hand tied behind its back institutionally, Richt managed to finish in the top-10 more often than he finished outside of it and came up one play short of Alabama for the 2012 SEC title, which was the de facto national championship game that year (Alabama went on to destroy overmatched Notre Dame).

Smart came in and immediately fixed those issues, showing Georgia’s administration what a winning infrastructure looked like. You haven’t heard anyone talk about "The Georgia Way” in years, unless they’re referring to knocking all of college football on its rear end.

That kind of low-hanging fruit simply doesn't exist at Texas A&M, which not only hasn’t had the same level of success Richt did but has already spent and spent and spent on infrastructure, coaching salaries and name, image and likeness. Everything you could want or conceive of to feed national championship aspirations has been put in place in College Station, except the coaching. 

But 11 failures in a row is no coincidence. Don’t try to tell anyone at A&M right now, but there are, in fact, some things money can't buy.