Elko credits Aggies' resilience after they 'kick that door down' at Notre Dame

SOUTH BEND, IND. — After Texas A&M’s 41-40 win over Notre Dame Saturday, coach Mike Elko gave an honest assessment of the game that moved his Aggies to 3-0 on the season.

“I don’t know that that thing went to script in any way, shape or form,” he said. “We battled through a blocked punt. We battled through some procedure penalties. We battled through coverage busts that created some open explosives for them, and we just kept fighting … and ultimately made the play we needed to make to win the football game on the road.”

Aggies keep coming back before closing the deal

The Aggies battled back from 17-7 and 24-14 deficits in the first half, then saw Notre Dame take a 40-34 lead with less than three minutes remaining in the game. A 99-yard touchdown return by Terry Bussey was called back on a hold, giving A&M 74 yards to negotiate with 2:41 left.

The Aggies were able to move 73 yards with fair efficiency, but the drive started to stall with 11 yards left. Facing a fourth and goal situation, A&M was given some extra time to work on their play call thanks to a timeout called with 19 seconds remaining by Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman.

“We changed the formation, the presentation of it, and ran a very similar play (to the one called) before the timeout. We wanted to honestly have something where Nate (Boerkircher) was running on the side, because we kind of thought it was really hard to get it to Mario (Craver) or KC (Concepcion) because they kind of bracketed them the two previous plays. And so we felt like that would give us an option on the sideline if we needed it,” he said. “And we did.”

The play, which isolated Notre Dame linebacker Drayk Bowen on Boerkircher, was one the Fighting Irish would not have seen on film.

“That’s a play that we have every week. It’s a play that we have not run yet this year,” Elko said. “It’s a play for that moment.” 

Those 11 yards were the last of the 360 picked up through the air by quarterback Marcel Reed, which was easily a career high. While some outsiders continued to view Reed as a running quarterback coming into the season, Elko knew he had the ability to make plays with his arm in critical moments.

“So if you now go through this, right, that’s Auburn, that’s the bowl game, and there’s this game. It’s the third time in a row that he led us on a game-winning drive,” he said of Reed. “That was a big piece of the offseason for him that, in those moments he has been really good, and they got overshadowed last year, obviously, because we lost those two games, but he has been really good in those moments, and so we had a lot of confidence.”

‘That narrative was never right’

Elko made it clear that the idea Reed couldn’t throw had been rubbing him the wrong way for months.

“That narrative was never right. There was that narrative was one of the most unfair narratives that had ever been created,” he said. “He completed over 60% of his passes. His touchdown to interception rate was elite. But for some reason, because he came in in the LSU game, and that was what everyone saw (was him running).”

Reed started off the game slowly, then started to hit his stride when Craver spun through three tacklers en route to an 86-yard touchdown to tie the game at 7. He hit another dry spell, punctuated by an interception by Leonard Moore on an under thrown deep pass, before his other superstar wideout came to the rescue.

“The catch KC he made before the long one (a 17-yard completion), he went really high on their sideline early in the game and came down with a ball that was like, that was one of the more impressive catches of the evening,” Elko said. “And then he went up and made the challenge catch on the deep throw (a 45-yard completion to the Notre Dame 1). Those two plays allowed Marcel to kind of like take a breath and kind of regroup.”

As the game went on and the defense and special teams continued to struggle, Elko said the offense never lost confidence in their ability to score points.
“The offensive guys were up and down the sideline all game, ‘We got you, we got you. Just keep going, we got you. We’re going to win this game,’” he said. “I thought that was a really, really good sign for where we were just mentally.”

Win ends long-standing road slump

The win was the first the Aggies have had against a top-10 ranked non-conference opponent on the road since 1979, and the first win over a top-10 team of any kind on the road since 2014, when the Aggies beat then-No. 3 Auburn 41-38. That drought was clearly one every member of the program was aware of.

“it’s been well documented how long it’s been since this program has gone on the road and beat a really good team. For us to do that on the road, in South Bend at night, against the team that was obviously desperate to save their season tonight, I just think it’s the step that we had to take to move forward,” Elko said. “I think that’s the door we had to kick down. I don’t think that we were going to just magically become a team that was going to go (to the College Football Playoff) and everything was going to go smoothly. We had to kick this door down, and we did that tonight.”

Elko was the defensive coordinator at Notre Dame before Jimbo Fisher hired him at A&M in 2018. If that caused the victory to have any additional meaning for him, Elko didn’t show it. 

“I’m so happy for our guys,” he said when asked if this win was a little more special due to his time in South Bend. “I think about everything that they put into this thing. I think about how much they put into this game, for them to be victorious tonight and get to enjoy that and enjoy moving this program in the right direction (and) for everything that they do.”