Texas
From Fisher to Fisch? Texas A&M casts wide net in coaching search

In his third season at Arizona, Jedd Fisch has coached the Wildcats to an 8-3 record ahead of Saturday’s rivalry game at Arizona State.
Rick Scuteri/Associated PressCOLLEGE STATION — The irrepressible Jedd Fisch was one of the first three assistant coaches in Texans history. Now he’s a candidate to become Texas A&M’s 31st head coach.
While Fisch, 47, is one of a handful of possibilities to replace the fired Jimbo Fisher, the tale of how he got to this point is a whopper — a true Fisch story.
Based on Steve Spurrier’s recommendation more than two decades ago, Texans coach Dom Capers immediately hired Fisch when Houston was getting back into the NFL business, Fisch had worked for Spurrier at the University of Florida from 1999-2000 after pestering the coaching icon for years for a graduate assistant gig.
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Fisch’s first two years in the NFL coincided with the Texans’ first two seasons of 2002-03. The New Jersey native has since worked for six more NFL teams, including serving as the New England Patriots’ quarterbacks coach in 2020, when Cam Newton took over for the departed Tom Brady.
“He was always very motivated and would go the extra mile to get things done,” Capers once told the Detroit Free Press of Fisch’s perpetual drive. “You could tell this profession meant an awful lot to him.”
Twenty years after Capers hired Fisch in Houston, the University of Arizona provided the former standout high school tennis player — Fisch didn’t even play high school football, much less college — his first chance to be a head football coach.
“Our identity is going to be toughness — mental toughness and physical toughness,” Fisch said upon his hire at Arizona three years ago. “It’s gonna be about a team that will never, ever, stop competing.”
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Fisch wasn’t kidding, and he’s become a hot commodity nationally based on the Wildcats’ 8-3 record ahead of a rivalry game at Arizona State on Saturday to round out the regular season. Arizona still has an outside shot at playing Washington in the Pac-12 title game on Dec. 1 in Las Vegas.
A&M athletic director Ross Bjork is searching from sea to sea for the deposed Fisher’s replacement, and the innovative Fisch is among a few rising-star candidates who appear to fit Bjork’s profile.
“We need to find somebody who can build (a) sustainable tenure,” Bjork said. “We need to find the next R.C. Slocum, who can be here for a long time, build it and win championships.”
Slocum, who was fired after the 2002 season, is the last A&M coach to win a league title. The Aggies won the 1998 Big 12 championship but have been shut out since in both the Big 12 and the Southeastern Conference, which they joined in 2012.
“The ingredients for a championship are here,” Bjork said. “Aggies want to do it the right way and deserve excellence in everything (they) do.”
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While Arizona’s 8-3 record on its own is hardly remarkable, the Wildcats were 9-20 from 2018-2020 under Kevin Sumlin — who in the often-small world of coaching came to Arizona following his firing at A&M in 2017.
“He’s got that thing turned,” Utah coach Kyle Whittingham said of the job Fisch has done in a short amount of time in Tucson. “He started from scratch and rebuilt it his way. … They play hard, and they’ve recruited well, and that’s always the biggest factor. They’ve done a really nice job in the last three years of infusing talent into the program.”
Other potential A&M candidates include Duke’s Mike Elko, Washington’s Kalen DeBoer, UTSA’s Jeff Traylor, Nebraska’s Matt Rhule, A&M interim coach Elijah Robinson, Kansas’ Lance Leipold and Ohio State’s Ryan Day, although Day is considered the longest of all the shots.
Fisch certainly has one stark memory of his Houston stint: He nearly died from an aortic dissection — a life-threatening tear in his heart that required emergency surgery in March 2003.
“His aorta had dissected from the top of the vessel all the way down,” Texans internal medicine doctor James Muntz told the Chronicle in 2003. “The aorta is the biggest blood vessel in the body, and the whole back wall of his aorta had disintegrated. He was in dire straits. Initially, they fixed the top part of the aorta and came back six days later and fixed the rest of it.”
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Fisch also told the Chronicle in 2003: “I’m grateful that I was in Houston. If I wasn’t in Houston, forget it. We wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Now he’s in the conversation for the Aggies’ plum job. Fisch makes about $3 million annually at Arizona, while Fisher made three times as much at A&M. Bjork has said the Aggies’ next coach will receive an incentive-based contract. He added that he hopes to have an agreement in place with a coach by the first few days of December, when the national transfer portal opens.