Josh Pate explains why he believes A&M's 'status quo' has changed

On Tuesday's edition of TexAgs Live, college football analyst Josh Pate joined us to talk all things NCAA football. Pate broke down the potential impact of power conferences before assessing Texas A&M's potential to become a powerhouse team regardless of the status quo.

Key notes from Josh Pate interview

• I haven't been to a live WWE event since 2006. I haven't liked what I've seen, but I was in Nashville and popped down to Bridgestone Arena. It was enjoyable. I'm not super into the roster. It's like if you took your niece, who is not super into A&M football, to a game. She's not up to date with the backup right guard situation, but she's enjoying it. But every now and then, she's asking, “Who's that?”
   
• Do you notice right now that there is a WWE ecosystem? This may have pulled me back into the new stuff. I would encourage people who don't like wrestling to watch the Dark Side of the Ring series. It's just fascinating. There is an entire industry with nostalgia-based wrestling podcasting and television. People aren't watching the new stuff, which I think mirrors other stuff in society right now.
   
• The NBA trade situation is like that. There isn’t a nostalgia factor, but there is something that is satellite to the main product. A fraction of the people who care about the games care about the game itself. It's just a soap opera. Wrestling just said, "Let's cut to the chase and admit we are a soap opera,” so people care about all the ancillary stuff. A lot of people figured that out.
   
• I watch the Super Bowl with a college lens. Remembering guys like Chris Jones. An NFL perspective is worrying about the injury or how dominant he is along the Chiefs' front. I'm thinking about him coming up the recruiting ranks in Mississippi and how fierce the battle was to pull him out of the state.
   
• With Jalen Hurts, I'm thinking about his story at Alabama and how a bunch of people who don't know about his high-profile benching at Alabama were about to hear that story again. He goes to Oklahoma, overcomes adversity and doubt and wins a Super Bowl. I'm thinking to myself, “I wonder how many people are going to remember that he didn’t transfer from Alabama after the national championship win.” I wonder how many people are going to go back and check out Alabama's spring game in 2018 to check out the gaggle of reporters around Hurts as he was snapping at people asking him why he was still here. Fast forward to December, and Tua Tagovailoa went down with an injury, and Hurts came off the bench to win the SEC Championship. I was thinking, is the full story of Hurts going to be told?
   
• After the season where Hurts got benched in the national championship game, I would be lying to you if I said that, at any point, I saw a robust NFL future for Hurts. If you had told me he would be a significant part of a Super Bowl win, I would have asked you at what position? I was one who doubted him.
   
• I wish I could put what Hurts has and put it into some of the five-star guys. There was a question in the 2018 season about if he should redshirt. I remember thinking that it was not the worst idea because he needed to preserve college football because it was probably the pinnacle for him. All it takes is one person believing, as long as it's the person in the mirror, and you only need one more guy to give you a shot. That's what Hurts had.
   
• If anyone hasn’t read it, what Ross Dellenger was painting is a picture that there is an entirely new governing arm or body of college football, which would be huge. He also didn’t say that the enforcement would switch hands. He said the enforcement would have teeth. After April 7, the House vs. NCAA decision will either be confirmed or delayed again. In that world, the conferences could step up and handle enforcement with this new body we created. They are sharing revenue with their players anyway, so anything above and beyond with NIL better be legitimate because they will have to prove that what they are giving is fair market value.
   
• The new body would have the power to investigate and impose sanctions. If we get to that world, the pendulum will swing back to the middle. It would be all about evaluation and development, and the traffic in the transfer portal would reduce 75 percent because there is an incentive to stay home. If a player makes more as a sophomore than as a freshman, even if they’re sitting on the bench, there is less incentive to transfer. It's all fingers crossed because nobody knows, but if the judge strikes it down, then we go back to the drawing board.
   
• I think there is a desire for that. The enticement to transfer will still be there, but it better be carving out a portion of revenue sharing to offer to another team, not with NIL. You're enforcing a salary cap in college football. Will we still have movement even though the language in the papers doesn’t exist? I think they want to learn the language there. I think they want to pay them enough money that there is a quasi-CBA that says, "If you are going to agree to pay the players $20 million a year, we can agree to stricter transfer rules." There are lawyers on every street corner waiting to challenge that. Everyone knows there is no way we walk out of that room with an agreement that stands up 100 percent to legal backing. We are talking about who is going to win in a courtroom.
   
• When I did the segment, I read our analytics, and as you know, anytime you say something that someone disagrees with, it's clickbait. It can't just be that someone has a difference in opinion. Saying that A&M has powerhouse tools was viewed as click-bait. To me, it is common sense. The premise of the segment was, "Do you think A&M will ever be a powerhouse?" You can look at it as a team that has the ingredients to be one, even if it hasn’t happened on the field, or it is a program that has already proved it. A&M has not been the latter but the former? No one has ever been able to convince me that that is not the case. The follow-up is people asking why it hasn’t happened yet. I would argue that No. 1, the right head coach, wasn’t there, and No. 2, you haven’t always had the resources in College Station that you do now.
   
• I would argue that it is a post-Johnny Manziel concept. One guy can transform a program forever, and Manziel did that. There are now things that are possible because of what happened a little over a decade ago. In fairness, I'm not talking about it being around for 100 years, but what has the University of Tennessee done? We go over the span of years in college sports. You don’t get to simulate a year every week, so if you get yourself in the wrong situation from a hiring perspective, you can end up in the ditch for a little while.
   
• History should count if the reason for your past is still present. I have to distinguish that with Texas A&M. If we are talking about Mississippi State, the things that have limited Mississippi State from winning the SEC will be there in 2021, but the things that have prevented A&M from winning the SEC are largely self-inflicted.
   
• A&M was working from a disadvantaged position in the past, and they don't work from a disadvantaged position anymore. No team badly outpositions them. It is the case now, and moving forward, A&M has everything on its plate in front of them. A&M's history is not all that relevant to me when I forecast them forward. Taking Mississippi State again, it'll continue to be that way.
   
• The status quo has changed in College Station.