This time around, there was no ceremonial pair of cowboy boots. There will be no national championship plaque with the year to be filled in later. And there will be no $75 million, fully-guaranteed contract.
Texas A&M's dismissal of Jimbo Fisher and its hiring of Mike Elko, his former assistant, as his replacement was many things, but most of all it was an admission that building a championship program was more than just hiring a coach who'd done it before and assuming the rest would take care of itself.
"We are not going to talk about it anymore," Elko said Monday, "we are going to be about it."
"I say this to my players all the time: there is no button you push to get to the top of college football," he said later. "There's a stair that you have to climb every single day to accomplish what you want to accomplish."
In the two weeks between the firing of Fisher and the hiring of Elko, Texas A&M AD Ross Bjork said he spoke to 30 coaches and more than 25 ex-players -- some of those, like Lions head coach Dan Campbell, are both -- which, he said, "helped crystalize the identity of the ideal candidate."
However, the most instructive activity Bjork and his team undertook, as he recounted Monday, was a research project that studied how each national champions in the SEC are built.
"The more you look at it, the simpler it gets. The majority of the winners have these things in common: a defensive-minded head coach, a championship-level culture, recruit and acquire elite NFL-type talent, play great offense and score a lot of points with a high-level quarterback," Bjork said.
Texas A&M's own history, the halcyon "Wrecking Crew" days of the 1990s under R.C. Slocum (himself a former A&M assistant before taking over the program), also led Bjork back to Elko.
"When is Kyle Field at its best? When the defense plays at an elite level," Bjork said.
Elko's return is interesting because it's equal parts a fast-track hire and a slow-burn hire. He was the defensive coordinator when A&M recruited its record-breaking 2022 recruiting class, who now enters its junior season in 2024. No SEC schedule will ever be "easy" moving forward, but the Aggies avoid Alabama, Georgia, Ole Miss and Oklahoma in 2024. Their toughest games (Notre Dame, LSU, Texas) are all at home. With the Playoff expanding, there's no reason A&M shouldn't, at minimum, be part of the conversation this time next year.
"We will become the absolute best version of ourself as quickly as possible, because the best version of Texas A&M football wins the national championship," Elko said. "The best version of Texas A&M football, our way, wins the national championship."
At the same time, what are fair expectations for a program whose lone national title came in 1939? Whose last conference championship came in 1998? How much time should a program that's 12-12 over the past two years spend talking about national championships?
"We also embrace who we are right now, where we need to work and where we need to improve to get where we want to go... No one will hand us anything -- not in this conference, not in this country, not in this era of college football. We're going to have to go out and get it. We're going to have to understand that there are no shortcuts to success."
Texas A&M will take the stairs under Mike Elko, and they'll do so in tennis shoes, not custom cowboy boots.