What I enjoyed most about the Mike Stoops Era at Texas A&M was the minimal cost, the limited time spent together, the lack of any troubling losses to SEC rivals — mainly the good night’s sleep I got while believing him to be leaving Kentucky for Aggieland.

What I find insane is that he’s not actually on his way to College Station.

On Saturday night, Stoops w as considered a lock for the job. By Sunday morning, he was out, and a national search for big names was on. A few hours later Duke’s Mike Elko was reported by several outlets as being headed back to Texas A&M. He was Jimbo Fisher’s defensive coordinator — a very successful one — for four seasons prior to taking the Duke job where he went 16-9.

What I don’t get is how Stoops was considered so unacceptable to the Aggie world that lives on message boards and social media and Elko is somehow fine. Elko, 46, is 10 years younger. He went 9-4 with Duke last season, opened this year with a big upset of Clemson but suffered some close losses to Notre Dame, North Carolina and Virginia to finish 7-5.

For what it’s worth, Stoops’ Kentucky team finished the regular season with a road upset of 10th-ranked Louisville. Elko’s Duke team suffered its worst loss of the season (23-0) to Louisville.

Stoops has proved to be a good, not great coach. He’s not winning a national title or playing for national championships like brother Bob. Then again he’s coaching at a basketball school, not football-mad Oklahoma. I think Stoops would have been a fine hire, a reasonable one for A&M, and the only real problem I had with the board pulling the plug on his offer was based on reports the team was determined to drag Dabo Swinney out of Clemson or Ryan Day away from Ohio State.

Those things weren’t likely to happen and would not necessarily go any better than Fisher did after Florida State. Coaches are as much a product of where they work as they are the tone-setters for those teams.

It was at least encouraging to hear Aggies athletic director Ross Bjork say, in a radio interview, that the school “has to get the contract right” this time around. It was an acknowledgement that the Aggies gave Fisher the worst contract of all time and were forced to pay a $76 million buyout, breaking the previous record by roughly $55 million. You should care about that because, essentially, those are your tax dollars at work. A&M was granted more than $1 billion in state funds last year. I know the Aggies say the buyout money (at least, initially) will come from their 12th Man Fund. But, you know, if they really have $76 million lying around in a special pool of donors’ money, nothing should prevent them from investing that back in the school or lowering that $1.2 billion state commitment just a bit, rather than giving it all to Fisher.

When I wrote about Fisher's costly exit not long ago, the standard response from Aggies was that they were proud to have that much money to throw away. It's a crazy world, and nothing is more bizarre than the college football aspect of it.

The truth is that Fisher, after winning a national title at Florida State, never got the Aggies to an SEC title game in his six years there. That’s hardly a surprise because A&M did not make it to Big 12 title games very often, nor did it win as many Southwest Conference championships as one might think.

Just as a refresher, in the roughly 80 years since World War II, the Aggies have had one run of real success. In the decade from 1985 to 1994, they won seven SWC championships. They captured no national titles and didn’t really compete for any in that stretch. The best of those teams — the 10-0-1 1994 squad — was not bowl eligible due to NCAA sanctions.

Before that, the Aggies won two SWC titles in 40 years. SMU and Rice were more productive. In the Big 12, the Aggies won one league championship, beating Kansas State 36-33 in 1998, in 16 seasons before departing for the SEC, where their time spent with the big boys has been less than fruitful.

The brief obsession with Day or Swinney or other “home run hires” ignores the fact those coaches can’t bring their past success with them. Day might be 56-7 at Ohio State, but he isn’t going 56-7 at College Station.

It’s all a guessing game but the fallacy — even greater in the NFL but still applicable in the college game — is to select older coaches who have won a title elsewhere and expect it to happen again. Different schools mean different foundations. And those successful coaches have almost always lost the key assistants and coordinators who were instrumental in winning so many games.

At least Elko knows what he’s getting into. He knows the terrain and his defenses were the best thing about the Fisher era. For his sake, here’s hoping Aggies fans don’t inflate expectations beyond what’s reasonable. It never hurts to read a little of your own history and try to learn from it.