I find it amazing that this is a supposed "institution of higher learning," and that they falsely pride themselves on not "lying, cheating, or stealing."
They ran away from us to the SEC (making sure the "final" game would be in CS, blaming it on mean old Texas and the LHN, yet it came out at the time that they had been in secret discussions with the SEC for well over a year, while publicly lying about it to everyone else. They then proceeded to attempt to destroy the Big 12 and blamed us for not rearranging our schedule to continue playing them.
Later, they spent way beyond their means to hire Jimbo Fisher and declared to the world that they were the richest program in college football by using falsely inflated numbers and mis-categorizing assets. In the process, they reset coaching salaries for everyone. Jimbo won NOTHING. They beat up on shit teams and inflated their win totals with FCS schools and a covid year in which they beat a bunch of terrible teams who had either recently fired their coaches or who did that season. During covid, their coach was cheating and illegally hosting recruits at his ranch "off the books." After that season, they spent more money they did not really have to give a shitty coach a ridiculous extension he did not actually merit because no one else really wanted to hire him.
In the 2022 recruiting period, they illegally paid players outside of NIL regulations because they mistakenly thought that would provide them a sustained big boost as a program. They did everything they could to crow about hos rich they were and how everyone was going to see that the sleeping giant (has anyone ever checked its pulse? I don't think it's asleep) had finally been awakened. In the process, they took a bunch of low character divas who were more interested in spending their illegal loot and smoking weed than they were in actually playing football. Their cheating was so blatant that they signed a #1 class, showing the whole world that something wasn't right, and drawing the ire of Nick Saban. During the same timeframe, they found out Texas and Oklahoma had been invited to the SEC, making A&M just another bottom-feeding SEC school. Rather than work to better their program, they immediately leaked the news in hopes of sabotaging the move. Seems really ethical, no.
Back on the football field, the Ags immediately faceplanted. The heat of the spotlight proved to be too much for a perennial middling program. Their mercenary players had no self-control, their head coach was detached from reality and stuck in his ways, and their irrational fanbase demanded the program be something it never has been: a winner. With Texas winning and bound for the SEC, A&M panicked. They shit all over themselves. Because of their idiotic contract "negotiations" (not negotiations at all. Fisher told them how it would all go) they owed Jimbo and staff a ton of money they don't actually have. No reasonable program would have fired him in 2023 with so much money owed, but Texas A&M is no reasonable program.
Without considering the consequences, they fired Jimbo. They had no replacement lined up. They really had no idea how much they would have to pay to hire an inexperienced replacement and his second rate cronies. They just HAD to do it. They could not let mean old t.u. get a jump on them in the SEC or make them look like the losers they are. A&M probed around and got turned down by several top tier and some less-than-stellar coaches. They hired Mark Stoops and then reneged when the rest of the CFB world made fun of what a mediocre hire that was. At that point, they had to hire the next person who wouldn't send Bjork's call to voicemail.
Here we are. The whole situation looks like it wasn't planned out...because it wasn't. As with everything else A&M has done in the last 15 or so years, this will blow up in their faces. Meanwhile, the athletic department still hasn't paid back the academic side for a loan they took out in the early 2000s. Maybe someone should put responsible adults in charge over there.