Fall Camp is Here
Elko, Aggies open practice building off strong offseason
The ?????????? begins.#GigEm pic.twitter.com/VjE0eLqYn3
— Texas A&M Football (@AggieFootball) July 31, 2024
One month away.
On August 31, Texas A&M will take the field in front of a jam-packed Kyle Field and a national television audience and get ready to battle Notre Dame.
It’s one of the nation’s premier non-conference matchups of the season, but it also marks game one of the Mike Elko era. So much has changed for this program in so little time—but it doesn’t always feel that way to the new head man of the Aggies.
“It feels like, in some ways, I got here two days ago,” Elko said at the start of his fall camp press conference earlier this week. “And, in some ways, (it feels like) I got here five years ago. But, we're here. We're at the start of fall camp. It's an exciting time.”
It’s an exciting time for the 12th Man as well, who eagerly awaits one of the most anticipated seasons in recent memory. The offseason was a quiet one—something Elko said he was proud of recently when speaking at SEC Media Days. It was a time which saw a focus, discipline, and eagerness displayed by a team which has fully embraced the new direction of the program.
“(Coach Elko is) making it a very disciplined team,” wide receiver Noah Thomas said. “That's a great start. He's a very smart coach, a great coach as well. (He’s an) Even better man. So him just putting that accountability on us and making sure we are doing what we need to do to get to where we want to be is the key to everything.”
One of the biggest changes in the offseason came through the workouts and conditioning program of highly-regarded new strength coach Tommy Moffitt. Elko said numerous times this summer how critical a strength and & conditioning program is to the culture of a team. And that program is already paying dividends.
Hear from the guys at the first day of camp??#GigEm pic.twitter.com/Z5yRKVQH3w
— Texas A&M Football (@AggieFootball) August 1, 2024
“Ahh, the Moffitt Method,” quarterback Conner Weigman said. “We're all locked in on it. We’re all bought in on it, 100-percent. That dude’s different. His attitude he brings to the weight room every single day is contagious and it comes on to us. We're fired up in the weight room every day. It doesn't matter if it's a 7 a.m. lift or 1 p.m. out in 100-degree heat. We're ready to go. It's been fun this offseason.”
Elko pointed out that, incredibly, no player missed a lift session over the summer. The buy-in is real.
“It's been well documented that Coach Moffitt has (made) a change in that room,” Elko said. “From a cultural standpoint, the way we look at strength and & conditioning is different. We wanted to put on strength. We wanted to put on mass. We wanted to go in there and make that room very challenging and very difficult—to create toughness, to create grit, to create an area where kids could really improve. And we've embraced it.”
It's not just about culture in the weight room though—that buy- in has also obviously paid off from a physical standpoint as well.
“If you have a very confident, competent strength and & conditioning coach, and they're in there consistently working really hard, you would anticipate seeing some strong gains,” Elko added. “I think a lot of their bodies just look a little bit different. They look like they've handled the last eight months the way you would expect them to. And that ultimately helps.”
As Fall Camp progresses from day one to two and week one into week two, Elko and his staff won’t enter with a specific expectation, or goal to accomplish, through each page flip of the calendar.
For the Aggies, it’s all about the approach.
“What we're trying to do in camp is establish what we believe winning football looks like,” Elko said. “We talk a lot about playing consistent, winning football, and that to me is not focused on the result. We have these internal formulas for what winning football looks like in practice, and we're trying to hit those marks day in and day out, consistently. That's what you're trying to build.”
