A head coach and quarterback tend to have a close bond.
That’s why it feels so strange for Mike Elko to prepare for the Saturday season opener between No. 20 Texas A&M and No. 7 Notre Dame in College Station, Texas.
For the previous two seasons, Elko served as head coach at Duke, where he recorded back-to-back winning seasons with Riley Leonard as his quarterback. Both of them moved onward and upward this offseason, with Elko landing the top job at Texas A&M and Leonard transferring to Notre Dame.
Now, the coach will spend Saturday trying to ruin his old quarterback’s evening.
“I think it’s interesting and weird and not really something I want to do,” Elko said. “But at the end of the day, it’s a part of the game. Obviously, (I) have a tremendous amount of respect for who he is not just as a player but also as a young man, his family and all of that.
“It’ll be three hours competing against each other and then the rest of the year rooting for him.”
Leonard will make his debut under center for Notre Dame, which brought him in to replace departed signal-caller Sam Hartman. Leonard passed for 4,450 yards and 24 touchdowns in parts of three seasons at Duke, and he proved capable with his feet as he rushed for 1,224 yards and 19 touchdowns.
Fighting Irish coach Marcus Freeman knows that Leonard and his teammates are in for a hostile environment at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field. Freeman and his coaching staff piped in noise during recent practices as a way to prepare for the chaos.
“We’ve trained, really, being able to execute your assignment in crazy conditions, with crowd noise and trying to do surprise situations in practice,” Freeman said. “But at the end of the day, they’ve got to do it when it matters, right?”
Notre Dame is coming off a 10-win season and has lofty goals in the first season of the expanded College Football Playoff format. The Fighting Irish have gone 19-7 since Freeman succeeded Brian Kelly as head coach.
Meanwhile, Texas A&M hopes that Elko can re-establish a proud program that has waned in recent seasons. The Aggies finished 7-6 last season and 5-7 the year before that, which is a big reason the school bought out former coach Jimbo Fisher.
Elko’s first test will be a big one. He said opening the season against a top-10 team comes with pros and cons.
“The pluses are the attention you’ve had (from) your players for the last eight months,” Elko said. “When you have this type of game, the sense of urgency you have from a preparation standpoint, the sense of urgency we had in training camp, you’d like to say that’s because of the coaches, but I’m certain the opener plays a huge role in that. …
“The negatives of it is it’s an opener. … You’re not going to have a lot of time to ease into this new program, these new systems that we’re running. You’re going to have to go out there opening night and be firing on all cylinders.”
This is the sixth meeting between the programs. Notre Dame has a 3-2 edge in the all-time series, though the Aggies won the most recent matchup in 2001 at home.
–Field Level Media
