College Football HQ

Texas A&M coach blasts college football teams for canceling spring games

Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko doesn't buy the excuse some college football teams are using for not playing their traditional spring games.

James Parks

While some college football programs are backing away from their yearly spring games, Texas A&M's coach is buying the reason.
While some college football programs are backing away from their yearly spring games, Texas A&M's coach is buying the reason. / Jake Crandall/ Advertiser / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

While the trend appears to be that several big college football teams are backing out of their traditional spring games, Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko admits the reason why they’re doing so doesn’t make a lot of sense to him.

Some coaches have expressed concern that the spring exhibition amounts to little more than a free try-out for rivals to tamper with and scout reserve players through the transfer portal.

“This thought of people recruiting off your roster or some of those things, I’m not buying some of that stuff,” Elko said on Wednesday.

“We’ll continue to have a spring game until we make it to the semifinals and then we’ll rediscover kind of what our offseason looks like,” he added.

That second point illustrates another concern that other schools have, a concern with having to play live football after having just been on the field as recently as late January.

That’s very different from the alleged tampering concern, and it’s one Elko takes more seriously.

“I think there’s two different elements of this,” he said. 

“There’s some teams who play real long seasons, and I think there’s a reality to having to redefine what your next offseason is like with the extended playoff and how many games some teams are playing. That’s real.”

Elko’s comments about tampering echo remarks made by his counterpart at Clemson, Dabo Swinney, who dismissed any real concerns about rival schools luring players into the portal.

As far as Swinney is concerned, there are so many other ways that teams can tamper with players that going that extra step to forgo spring games won’t do enough to stop the problem.

“Ain’t nobody going to go look at the spring game, go, ‘Oh yeah, boy,’” Swinney said.

“They’ve got everything on everybody already. Canceling the spring game ain’t gonna stop tampering. We’re going to need a lot more help than that to stop tampering. And hopefully at some point that’ll happen.”

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James Parks
JAMES PARKS

James Parks is the founder and publisher of College Football HQ. He previously covered football for 247Sports and CBS Interactive. College Football HQ joined the Sports Illustrated Fannation Network in 2022.

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