Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko dismissed one of the largest fan communities in college sports as a "cesspool" after his team fell to 3-3 — showing once again that the multimillionaire class running college athletics treats the working Americans who fund the whole system with open contempt.
The modern town square is a message board, and a coach making $69 million just told the townspeople to shut up.
After a 27-6 loss at Missouri on Saturday, Elko was asked what he'd say to fans losing faith in the program. Instead of the usual coach-speak, he went out of his way to attack the TexAgs community — a site run by Billy Liucci with over 350,000 followers across social media and thousands of paid subscribers. "There's a difference to me between the fan base and social media," Elko said. "So there's one group that I really don't care much about. Billy's cesspool can go be Billy's cesspool. Our fan base, stay with us, be behind us."
Fox News framed the comments as a head-scratching decision to alienate the "most passionate and most influential fans in all of Aggie land." CBS Sports went further, calling the remarks "ridiculously tone deaf" — and noting the irony that the same "cesspool" likely helped Elko get his job in the first place.
Here's the part CBS Sports reported that matters: In November 2023, when news leaked that Kentucky's Mark Stoops was poised to take the Texas A&M job, an intense fan backlash erupted on TexAgs. That pushback forced A&M administrators to reverse course and hire Elko, then at Duke. As CBS Sports put it, "Elko owes Liucci and his 'cesspool' a thank-you card for his $69 million contract."
So let's follow the money. Texas A&M started the season ranked eighth, with one of the highest-paid NIL rosters in the sport and senior quarterback Marcel Reed returning. Now they're 3-3, Reed is what CBS called "an inconsistent mess," and the Aggies have lost five of their last seven games against power opponents. The fans who buy the tickets, fund the NIL collectives, and keep the lights on are frustrated — and the coach's response is to call their gathering place a cesspool.
Liucci himself pushed back on social media, calling Elko's comments "ridiculously tone deaf." He's right. This is the same playbook establishment figures always run: dismiss the people who ask questions, demonize the spaces where they organize, and pretend the only legitimate voices are the ones signing your checks.
The Aggies still have trips to Alabama and Oklahoma on the schedule, plus matchups with Tennessee and Texas. The season is effectively over. The question now is whether the administration that caved to fan pressure once will do it again — or whether the people who actually fund this enterprise will be told once more to sit down and shut up.
