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He has proven that he's a winner at every stop.

Even though his stay at ND was just one year as a defensive coordinator, he took what everyone thought was a terrible pool of Brian Van Gorder players (62 out of 128 teams), and turned them into a good to very good defense (31st out of 130 teams), all while elevating the talent already in place by a big margin. Clark Lea ended up inheriting a solid group of players, and went on to be one of our best DC's in recent history.

He did something similar at Texas A&M as their defensive coordinator, flipping them from having the 87th ranked defense, to the 19th ranked defense, and kept their defense performing at a solid level his entire time, even having the 3rd best defense in 2021. If anything, his being hired is what saved Jimbo Fisher from getting terminated earlier.

He turned around a Duke team that had a really terrible year (caused Cutcliffe to retire) and turned them around, making them a bowl team in 2022 and 2023.


That's not a coincidence. That shows an excellent mind for coaching. Had we hired him in 2022 as a replacement for the purple faced one, I would have been quite happy (don't get me wrong; I'm very happy with the Freeman hire).

He just happened to run into one of the best defenses in all of college football yesterday, against a very good up and coming coach. I'm sure that having a quarterback being struck with heat exhaustion (projectile vomitting twice on the sidelines) didn't help either, since he couldn't complete a pass in 4Q.

There are better days ahead for Mike Elko, and I'll be happy when he turns that program around in its entirety.