No one cares how Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher landed his top-ranked recruiting class
Less than a week has passed since Texas A&M won the 2022 college football offseason national championship, and the Aggies are still aglow from their new title.
Between the two national signing days, the Aggies signed so many star players Kyle Field will now come with a red carpet out of the locker room to the grass.
Never in the history of recruiting rankings has a school pulled off signing an incoming class quite like what the Aggies just did.
The class is so stacked, the allegation du jour is that the Aggies pooled their cash for a $30 million NIL slush fund to sign these players.
That $30 million figure is preposterous.
Now, $3 million for a recruiting class that features the nation’s No. 1 ranked defensive lineman and tight end, No. 2 quarterback and wide receiver, No. 3 interior lineman, and No. 4 cornerback sounds plausible.
Coach John James Fisher took exception to the $30 million figure, Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin’s crack that the Aggies are over the “luxury tax,” and any allegations of wrong doing, so he went on an epic rant this week during National Signing Day II.
The JJ rant appeased the Aggie base, but in an era where not even the rule makers have any power to enforce rules they no longer care about his tirade is just for the cameras.
If the Aggies spent $30 dollars, or $30 million dollars, to land this class of players, never has it been more evident that people do not care.
As much as this whole system is an indictment of the state of higher education, the masses are powerless to stop it or just have no interest in changing it.
Even the NCAA tacitly concedes their 800-page rule book is for suckers, and if the Aggies want to invest $30 million to land the highest-rated recruiting class, or give all incoming players a Trans Am, more power to ‘em.
The class is so good that in just a short time John James should win the Aggies’ first SEC West championship, first SEC conference title game, make their first appearance in the College Football Playoff, and celebrate the Aggies’ first national title since 1939.
If by the end of the 2024 season the Aggies have not achieved at least one of these obtainable goals, then Jimbo is going to hear it for a clear and total failure to “achieve any of the objectives for which he was hired.”
They didn’t join the SEC to be Arkansas 2.0.
The Aggies have been in the SEC since 2012, and their best season came in that first year in the league.
That was when Johnny Manziel beat Alabama in Tuscaloosa as he partied, usually in Austin, his way to the Heisman Trophy. The Aggies defeated the Sooners in the Cotton Bowl en route to a fifth-place final ranking.
A&M finished the 2020 season 9-1, and robbed of a playoff berth, but that entire season was muted, and tainted, by COVID.
The Aggies have made every single investment necessary to win college football’s absurdly expensive national title. No one can question the Aggies’ commitment, or even their sanity.
The price of winning in college football is brain-dead stupid, but the Aggies are all in and Jimbo has no reason to be defensive.
Even if this top-ranked recruiting class cost $30 million, he has nothing to explain. No one cares any more, not even the NCAA.
After the Aggies finish celebrating their 2022 College Football Offseason National Title, they should start winning the titles in the fall.
If they somehow can’t win any of these titles in the next three years, then all of this will be the state’s biggest waste of money since ERCOT, and Texas A&M will just be another Arkansas.
This story was originally published February 4, 2022 at 5:11 PM.
