Picking a good sleeper team is lot like being the first friend in your crew to discover that you can order “Frings” at Burger King and score both fries and rings in the same order. Basically you look like a genius.
ESPN College Gameday insider Pete Thamel believes he’s found his own secret menu item in the SEC for the 2024 season: one of the original Big 12 refugees, the Texas A&M Aggies.
One could be forgiven for letting the Aggies slide off the radar. With the arrival of the Oklahoma Sooners and Texas Longhorns to the SEC in 2024, it might be easy to forget there was already another SEC team in Texas at College Station.
And while the biggest coaching hire in the SEC, and maybe all of college football, is most certainly head coach Kalen DeBoer at the Alabama Crimson Tide, replacing the GOAT Nick Saban, the Aggies also went out and got themselves an exciting new leader to replace the disappointing Jimbo Fisher in former Duke Blue Devils head coach and defensive mind, Mike Elko. (Of course Elko was Fisher's defensive coordinator at A&M from 2018-2021.)
And it’s Elko’s defense that has Thamel excited for the Aggies’ prospects.
“[The Aggies] may have one of the three best defensive lines in the league,” Thamel notes.
And he goes so far as to say they may even be ranked second behind only the Sporting News Composite Poll No. 1 Georgia Bulldogs.
The Aggies brought in All Big 10 selection and 2023 conference sack leader, edge rusher Nic Scrouten from the Purdue Boilermakers. They also return senior defensive tackle Shemar Turner and sophomore defensive end Shemar Stewart, giving the Aggies what Thamel calls “three first-round talents” on the defensive line.
In the hands of Mike Elko, defensive weapons like that could be dangerous for opposing offenses. In only his first year at Duke, a far cry from the talent rich player pool he has at Texas A&M, the Blue Devils went from giving up 40 points a game in 2021 to surrendering only 22.1 in 2022, good for sixth best in the ACC. In 2023, the points per game went down to 19, good for 17th in the nation.
Thalen expects Elko to bring more than a stifling defense to the Aggies, also returning the kind of team spirit, morale, and enthusiasm that can motivate a program to overachieve and fight through adversity, the intangibles that seemed to be missing during Jimbo Fisher’s failed tenure at A&M, which got so bad that the Aggies were willing to give the former Florida State Seminoles prodigy $76 million to not coach for them in 2024.
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With a host of exciting SEC offensive-minded teams gobbling up attention as potential breakout teams, like head coach Lane Kiffin’s Ole Miss Rebels or the Josh Heupel led Tennessee Volunteers, it would be refreshing to see a potentially defensively dominant SEC team make some noise in 2024.
With Sporting News composite poll No. 7 Notre Dame visiting College Station for the Aggies’ first game of the season, Elko and his defense will have an early opportunity to prove Thalen right and become the surprise SEC entree the fans didn’t know they were missing.
