Latest news with #TexasA&M
USA Today
2 hours ago
- Sport
- USA Today
3 Texas A&M players included in Pro Football Focus's Top 50 2026 NFL Draft prospects
3 Texas A&M players included in Pro Football Focus's Top 50 2026 NFL Draft prospects Texas A&M's 2025 football roster isn't lacking talent at any position. While the disappointing 1-4 finish during the 2024 season still haunts most of the Aggie fan base, it's time to move on and look ahead, as the 2025 campaign, which his highly critical for coach Mike Elko's future, is less than 100 days away. This offseason, during several speaking events, Elko emphasized the importance of building the program through recruiting elite talent and developing prospects to send to the NFL ultimately. During the 2025 NFL draft, only three Aggies heard their names called, led by junior edge Shemar Stewart, who was selected with the 17th overall selection by the Cincinnati Bengals. Followed by edge Nic Scourton (Carolina Panthers) and defensive lineman Shemar Stewart (Chicago Bears) going early in the second round, three players drafted isn't a good number for most SEC programs, outside of Vanderbilt, but this was mainly due to several veterans, including left tackle Trey Zuhn, right guard Ar'maj Reed-Adams, and running back Le'Veon Moss, who would have been selected in the early rounds. For the 2026 NFL draft, Pro Football Focus believes Texas A&M will have at least three players guaranteed to be selected in the first two or three rounds, led by linebacker Taurean York, guard Ar'maj Reed-Adams, and wide receiver KC Concepcion, who transferred to College Station from NC State this offseason. Here is where each player landed in PFF's Top 50 2026 NFL prospects Taurean York (23rd) Ar'Maj Reed-Adams (28th) KC Concepcion (35th) Two former Aggies were also ranked, led by defensive tackle LT Overton (20th) and, former Texas A&M QB turned star Vanderbilt tight end Eli Stowers finsihing the rankings at No. 50. Texas A&M needs to take advantage of the talent and experience on the roster, which would be a shame, and detrimental to the coaching staff to waste in 2025. Contact/Follow us @AggiesWire on X and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Texas A&M news, notes and opinions. Follow Cameron on X: @CameronOhnysty.
USA Today
3 hours ago
- Sport
- USA Today
Texas A&M's bullpen is in good shape with several pitchers returning
Texas A&M's bullpen is in good shape with several pitchers returning Texas A&M's baseball program will continue to be headed by Michael Earley, who will retain his position going into the 2026 season, which was met with mixed reactions within the Aggie fan base. After finishing 30-26 and 11-19 in SEC play during the inaugural season, Earley is entering a "prove it" year entering the summer. However, he'll likely have most of the 2025 roster to work with after five players, led by third baseman Gavin Grohavac and freshman outfielder Terrence Kiel II, announced their returns, while up-and-coming relief pitchers Clayton Freshcorn and Caden McCoy joined the party on Saturday afternoon. With Freshcorn and McCoy returning, Texas A&M's future bullpen is in great shape. On paper, starter Shane Sdao, who was injured last season, is slated to return. At the same time, ace Ryan Prager and Justin Lamkin could declare for the MLB draft, but should consider returning for a final season to increase their value, especially Prager. Behind Freshcorn and McCoy are several young arms, including Aiden Sims and Gavin Lyons, who saw an increase in playing time during non-conference games. However, nothing matches the likely return of veteran reliever Josh Stewart, who was also lost early in the 2025 season, and will be healthy heading into the winter months. One of the reasons Michael Earley and pitching coach Jason Kelly used so many arms throughout the season was to gain valuable experience, especially during SEC play. If Clayton Freshcorn and Caden McCoy live up to their immense potential next season, the early struggles of last season will have paid off. Contact/Follow us @AggiesWire on X and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Texas A&M news, notes and opinions. Follow Cameron on X: @CameronOhnysty.
The Herald Scotland
8 hours ago
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
CFP, March Madness don't need to expand. Why are leaders pushing it?
But after months of debate on both fronts, what's become clear is that expansion is going to happen for no reason other than a vapid sense of inertia sprung from the bruised egos of sports executives - who subconsciously understand their own fundamental weakness and ineffectiveness are to blame for the spiral of chaos that college sports can't seem to escape. At least when they push a button to expand a postseason, it feels like they're doing something. That's an explanation. It's not a reason. When the NFL expanded its playoffs from 12 to 14 in 2020, changing its format for the first time in three decades, the obvious factor was an influx of money: Hundreds of millions of dollars, in fact, half of which gets split with players. When the NBA shook up its postseason and created the play-in tournament, the primary motivation was to keep more teams competitive late in the season and discourage tanking. Those are sensible reasons everyone can understand. But neither Baker nor one of the prominent conference commissioners like the SEC's Greg Sankey or the Big Ten's Tony Petitti have been able to articulate a clear and concise mission statement for what expansion of either tournament is supposed to accomplish. They just want to do it. Here's how thin the rationale is regarding March Madness: Speaking with reporters in Orlando, Baker cited the committee snubbing Missouri Valley Conference regular-season champion Indiana State in 2024 despite a 32-7 record, suggesting an expansion would get the NCAA tournament closer to including the "best" 68 teams. Of course, the NCAA tournament has always worked this way. Excellent mid-major teams that lose in their conference tournament often don't get in. And as the track record of the tournament clearly shows, the vast majority of bids in an expanded field would go to power conference teams with questionable records. The push to expand March Madness precedes Baker's tenure, which began in March 2023. In fact, you can trace the momentum back to March of 2022 when Texas A&M was left out despite a late-season surge to the championship game of the SEC tournament, converting Sankey into a public proponent of expansion. But the idea that tournament spots are being filled by automatic qualifiers from mid-major conferences with less chance to do damage in the tournament than Texas A&M's 2022 team, for instance, isn't new. It's part of the deal, and there's no real demand to move the cut line other than from those who are inconvenienced by it. In fact, one of the big obstacles to March Madness expansion - and the reason it didn't happen years ago - is that there's not a huge pot of television money out there for a few more games between mediocre basketball teams on Tuesday and Wednesday of tournament week. Not only is expansion unlikely to boost profits in a significant way, it's an open question whether the NCAA can expand the tournament without diluting the shares of its revenue distribution model, which are worth about $2 million per team per round. A similar dynamic is at play in the CFP debate. 12-team CFP worked; trashing it makes no sense There were clear incentives for the conference commissioners when they first floated expanding the football tournament from four to 12 teams back in 2021. Not only had TV ratings leveled off, perhaps due to many of the same programs populating the field year after year, but going to 12 would both guarantee access for all the power conference champions and set the table for a $1.3 billion per year contract with ABC/ESPN beginning in 2026 - nearly triple the original 12-year deal that established the CFP. But that's where things get murky. Even before the first 12-team playoff last year, conference commissioners were *already* batting around a 14-team model for 2026. That has now morphed into a likely 16-team bracket. The financial terms of the TV deal, however, will not change in a significant way, whether they land at 12, 14 or 16. So why do it? Not because it's a great business proposition - in fact, there's a legitimate concern about playoff oversaturation and potential second-order effects - but because the more you expand access, the more access everyone wants. That's what we have seen over the last week, especially from the SEC meetings as Sankey and others in the league launched a breathtaking, shameless propaganda effort attempting to rewrite recent history. Getting a mere three teams into last year's 12-team playoff while the Big Ten won its second straight title seems to have done a psychological number on those folks. Rather than admit the truth - the SEC didn't have an amazing year in 2024 and the playing field nationally has been leveled to some extent by NIL and the transfer portal - they are arguing to shape the next CFP format based on a level of conference strength that certainly existed in the past but hasn't in the NIL/transfer portal era. One prominent athletics director, Florida's Scott Stricklin, questioned whether the football bracket should be chosen by committee. Another unnamed administrator went so far as to muse that the SEC and Big Ten should think about just holding their own playoff, according to Yahoo! Sports. If you take a step back and look at what's happening from a 30,000-foot view, it smacks of famed political scientist Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History," where he writes about how the triumph of Western liberalism and consumerism has unwittingly created this kind of regressive condition that shows up in so many facets of life and culture. "If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation," he wrote, "then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle." That kind of feels like what's going on here. Aside from a small adjustment in how it was seeded, nothing about the 12-team playoff seemed problematic. If anything, it was widely praised for delivering what the original expansion proponents wanted: Geographic diversity, representation for the four power conferences and the Group of Five, first-round playoff games in college venues and a lot of interesting games from the quarterfinals on. In other words, it worked. And there is no obvious reason - financial or otherwise - to have chucked it in the trash already while the four power conferences launch a war amongst themselves about how much access gets allocated to each conference, and by whom. The angst is especially confusing from the SEC, which just got a record 14 bids to the men's basketball tournament (including national champion Florida), has eight of the 16 national seeds for the baseball tournament and five of the eight teams in the Women's College World Series. They're doing just fine, and there is a long track record of being justly rewarded when their teams perform at the highest level. There's little doubt that will happen again in football regardless of which playoff system gets implemented. It just didn't happen last year because the SEC, for once, did not deserve it. But the Big Ten and the SEC are, as Fukuyama wrote, struggling for the sake of struggle. The more power they have amassed by reshaping the landscape through realignment, the more they claim the system is broken. Some believe their end game is a separation from the NCAA, creating a world where they don't have to share a business partnership with conferences and schools they believe aren't bringing as much value to the table. The reality, though, is that any such move would draw a level of scrutiny - legal and political - they are not currently prepared to handle, not to mention the arduous work of building out the infrastructure for all kinds of unglamorous stuff the NCAA already provides. So instead, they wage war against problems that don't really exist, reach for solutions that create actual problems and then fail to solve the problems right in front of their face. The push to expand the NCAA tournament and the CFP are merely symptoms of an affluenza swallowing the highest levels of college sports. Knowing they've failed miserably to execute on the important issues they truly need to solve to ensure the long-term health of their business, the likes of Sankey and Petitti and many others have elevated tedium to a crisis. So a crisis is what they shall have.
Yahoo
15 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
UT Tyler student chosen for UT System Board of Regents
TYLER, Texas (KETK) – A student from the University of Texas at Tyler was selected by Governor Abbott to serve as a student regent on the University of Texas System Board of Regents. Luke Schwartz, who is currently a graduate student at UT Tyler, was selected to represent students as the student regent for the University of Texas System Board of Regents. Schwartz received his bachelor's degree in nutrition from Texas A&M University and is currently pursuing a doctorate of medicine at UT Tyler. Woman accused of stealing wig from corpse at Tyler funeral home Abbott appointed several other student regents for public university boards across the state. A board of regents will govern the activities of each university in their system. In Texas, public university boards are appointed by the governor. Students who were appointed as student regents by Gov. Abbott on Friday include: Kohl Crawford from Texas Southern University Jaquavous Doucette from Texas A&M University Donavan Brown from Texas State Eli Health from Texas Tech University Alyssa Flores from Texas Woman's University Adrian Caraves from Univeristy of Houston Hayden Wochele University of North Texas Abbott also selected Lisa Cantu of Texas A&M University to serve on the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. The board strives to be an advocate for high education while promoting access to anyone looking to receive a college education. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
USA Today
17 hours ago
- Sport
- USA Today
Texas A&M Baseball 2025 Transfer Portal Tracker
Texas A&M Baseball 2025 Transfer Portal Tracker It's been a whirlwind 2025 season for the Texas A&M baseball team, filled with ups and downs that ultimately led to a disappointing finish. After becoming the first preseason No. 1 team in decades to miss the NCAA Tournament, first-year head coach Michael Earley's job was in question for weeks. However, Texas A&M athletic director Trev Alberts announced that Earley would be retained, though changes were on the horizon. One of those changes came in the coaching staff, with fielding coach Will Fox being the first to be let go. Fox spent six seasons in Aggieland, but given the number of errors on seemingly routine plays, the Aggies felt it was time to move in a different direction. More staffing changes could follow, and the same uncertainty applies to the roster. While several players have already committed to returning under Earley for the 2026 season, others will inevitably depart for personal reasons. Entering the transfer portal does not necessarily mean a player is leaving, but starting the process early offers the best chance of finding a new team. To help keep track, here is the updated transfer portal tracker of who is going and who is coming. Entered Portal: Kyrin LeBlanc - Pitcher - Junior Nathan Tobin - Outfield - Freshman Hayden Crites - Catcher - Freshman Committed / Returning to A&M: Gavin Grahovac - Infield - Sophomore Terrence Kiel II - Outfield - Freshman Clayton Freshcorn - Pitcher - Sophomore Caden McCoy - Pitcher - Freshman Bear Harrison - Catcher - Sophomore Contact/Follow us @AggiesWire on X (formerly Twitter) and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Texas A&M news, notes and opinions. Follow Jarrett Johnson on X: @whosnextsports1.
