Texas A&M deserves better from Jimbo after the commitment it has shown him | Opinion

In what essentially amounts to one month Texas A&M’s momentum has, as Davy Crockett once famously (kinda) said, “Gone to Texas.”

Jimbo Fisher isn’t in Hell, but he is in College Station, which for so many coaches before him can get awfully hot even as the temperature cools down.

The fourth-year coach of our beloved Texas A&M Aggies is a nice little upgrade over his predecessor, Kevin Sumlin. Jimbo is the best coach this program has had since R.C. Slocum, or Jackie Sherrill.

And not only is Jimbo ripping off the Aggies, but whatever thoughts we/me had that it was A&M, not Texas, that would run things in this state were greatly exaggerated.

Jimbo is not going to leave College Station for LSU when that school inevitably fires Ed Orgeron, which could be by season’s end.

Jimbo currently has the greatest job in the nation. He is beloved for winning nine games, and could build a lap pool in his house and fill it not with water but $100 bills.

No school in the country is getting less out of its investment more than Texas A&M and Jimbo. A&M deserves better than this steaming cow flop.

Jimbo and the Aggies host No. 1 Alabama on Saturday night in College Station. ’Bama is favored only by 17.5 points.

The Aggies will lose, falling to 3-3 overall and 0-3 in the SEC. And they are going to lose at least one more game after that before season’s end.

Probably two more.

No school overreacted to a successful season any more than the Aggies did earlier this year when they rushed to bury Jimbo in more money than a mathematician could count.

He already had $75 million guaranteed through 2028, but that wasn’t nearly enough. The Aggies approved a raise/extension to $9 million to $9.15 million per season through 2031.

Jimbo will soon be the second highest paid coach in college sports, trailing only Alabama’s Nick Saban.

This will be the third time in Jimbo’s four years in College Station the Aggies will have lost four or more games.

Saban hasn’t lost a game since 2019. He lost five games between 2016 to 2019.

Jimbo’s lone standout season with A&M is 2020, when the Aggies finished 9-1 and fourth nationally. That was a good team, and they were robbed of a playoff berth because they were not named “Fighting Irish.”

And, all of this success came in the COVID season, a year when winning didn’t mean nearly as much as just playing. It was hard to “feel” the normal fun that come in those types of seasons when you can’t go to the games.

When Texas A&M athletic director Scott Woodward lured Jimbo away from Florida State in 2018 the idea was that the coach would do in College Station what he did in Tallahassee.

In Jimbo’s first four years with Florida State, the Seminoles were 45-10, and won the national title in his fourth season.

Pretty sure the Aggies aren’t winning the national title this season.

His starting quarterback is hurt, and the backup plays behind an offensive line that is basically five new players.

There were plenty of reasonable reasons to expect that Texas A&M was not going to be as good in 2021 as they were last year.

And the Aggies should not be this bad. They should not be losing to Arkansas in a neutral site game, and at home to an ish Mississippi State team.

Meanwhile, SEC-bound Texas has recovered from its embarrassing loss at Arkansas and will play Oklahoma in the Red River Shootout at the Cotton Bowl on Saturday. Texas is a 3.5 point underdog, but the Longhorns can win this game, and could even win the Big 12.

For a brief time it actually looked like Texas A&M was going to own Texas, but those sentiments were greatly exaggerated.

The Aggies are just not very good, but they can at least celebrate the fact that while their coach doesn’t win like Saban, he’s paid like him.