Dave Wilson is an editor for ESPN.com since 2010. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun.
SHORTLY AFTER TEXAS A&M athletic director Ross Bjork fired Jimbo Fisher, he described what the Aggies are seeking in a replacement. They’re looking for a coach who’s open to change, adaptable, organized, easy to work with, has a creative offense and is more of a CEO type than someone who’s in the film room all night.
It sounded like he was describing the opposite of Fisher.
Fisher was fired Sunday morning late in his sixth season at Texas A&M with more than $76 million remaining on his fully guaranteed contract. He was undone by an offense — his offense — that didn’t keep up with the trends in college football, ranking 101st nationally in scoring during a disastrous 5-7 season in 2022. He was undone by a stubbornness to change, waiting until Year 6 to even hire an offensive coordinator. He was undone, sources say, by his ego and his insistence on making each and every decision.
No doubt there were tantalizing highs: Fisher’s 2020 COVID-year team finished 9-1 against an all-SEC schedule and notched a 41-27 win in the Orange Bowl to finish the season at No. 4, the Aggies’ highest season-ending ranking since their 1939 national championship season. Fisher remained popular with players until the end and recruited at a level never seen before in College Station. In 2022, he landed one of the most touted recruiting classes in modern history, ranked No. 1 nationally.
But the low points were lower than the Aggies could have bargained for. There were five seasons with four or more losses, including that 2022 campaign, in which the Aggies opened the season at No. 6, only to crash to a 5-7 record amid a six-game losing streak. It was the program’s first losing season since 2009. Somewhere in that mess was a home loss to Appalachian State in which Fisher’s offense managed 180 yards and nine first downs. The Aggies became a joke. They were the biggest underachievers in the country.
Meanwhile, Fisher’s singular focus on running his program his way didn’t endear him to many people on campus. Fisher was the decision-maker on everything, and if you questioned why something was done a certain way, you were likely to be met with an angry response, sources said. (Fisher did not return a message seeking comment for this story.)
That included habits like Fisher’s desire to travel to road games on Thursday nights, meaning players and staff left campus shortly after practice, and sometimes didn’t get to hotels until late in the evening or early mornings. Then they’d wake up on Friday mornings and have meetings and just wait around for the game.
“No one does that,” one Power 5 operations director said. “It impacts academics, takes staff away from their families — and there’s nothing to do. You’re just asking for players to get in trouble.”
A staff member agreed: “You just felt like you were there for so long. That kind of wears on the players.”
The results bear that out. The Aggies have lost nine straight road games dating to the 2021 season. They were 0-9 against ranked teams on the road during Fisher’s entire tenure. When something wasn’t working, it seemed like Fisher was reluctant to change.
“You have to adapt, you have to evolve,” Bjork said at a news conference after Fisher’s firing. “I’m not going to say whether he did or didn’t, but it didn’t work.”
Looking back, that 2020 season was obviously an anomaly. As issues piled up, Fisher, enabled by his contract, doubled down on doing things his way.
“There was no hope that this would ever get better because what was going to change?” a staff member said. “He wasn’t going to listen to anybody else. It was just going to continue the way that it was.”
In the end, the Aggies decided it was no longer worth throwing good money after bad. They decided it was worth $76 million to send Fisher out the door a day after a 41-point win.
“Modern-day football requires, to me, a certain type of leadership,” Bjork said. “You’re moving forward and you’re making change and you’re dialed into what the young men want and what they expect in terms of style of play and the system and the culture and the day-to-day.”
He didn’t see that happening under Fisher.
“To me, [the lack of] all of those things were just leading to lack of confidence,” Bjork said.
AFTER THE WORST offensive season of Fisher’s career — the Aggies averaged 22.7 points a game last season — Fisher hired Bobby Petrino to take over the offense. The Aggies had a potential superstar at quarterback in Conner Weigman and skill position talent all around him, including receiver Evan Stewart. There was cautious optimism around the 2023 season. A longtime SEC personnel director called Texas A&M’s roster one of the best three in the league this year.
But after the Aggies sputtered in October losses to Alabama and Tennessee, scoring just three points in the second half of each loss, Fisher’s future appeared precarious for the first time, even accounting for the massive buyout that would accompany his firing. And for the second year in a row, offensive line troubles forced the Aggies to play their third-string quarterback.
Fisher’s in-game decisions remained a source of frustration. Against Alabama, he chose to punt on fourth-and-1 at the Tide’s 45-yard line in the third quarter of a 17-17 game. Alabama scored six plays later and never trailed again. That one call became emblematic of larger issues for a fanbase that felt, even against the best teams in the league, Fisher was playing too conservatively, almost not to lose as opposed to trying to win.
“If it wasn’t a full yard, inside a yard, [we] probably would have went,” Fisher said.
Fisher runs a complex, pro-style offense and multiple staffers indicated that while Petrino was calling the plays, a large portion of the plays he was calling were still Fisher’s offense.
The offense worked when everything clicked, but proper execution became increasingly difficult with the revolving door at quarterback and the transfer portal leading to the addition of new players unfamiliar with the system.
Even when it didn’t work, Fisher stayed the course.
“We’ve had things there,” Fisher said after those losses to Tennessee and Alabama in which the offense scored 33 points combined. “It’s just a matter of executing plays. It has been shocking that we haven’t been able to go out and execute like that.”
But it was Fisher’s job to get them to execute, and “just gotta execute” became the defining phrase of his tenure.
“It’s too complicated,” a former player said. “And that’s why I think you saw a lot of struggles with it. It just seemed like all these pieces have to go right for a play to work. There’s a lot of thinking. There’s not a lot of just going out and playing. And I think that’s a big deal.”
And it didn’t help that the quarterbacks were battered. In this year’s game against Tennessee, Pro Football Focus said Max Johnson was pressured on 25 of his 39 dropbacks, or 64.1% of them.
According to ESPN Stats & Information research, Texas A&M QBs were hit on 51.7% of their dropbacks in the Alabama and Tennessee games. Among the 75 FBS teams with a minimum of 50 dropbacks over that two-week span, A&M was the only school with a QB contact percentage of more than 50%. The next closest were Kent State at 49.4% and Akron at 47.2%.
Kellen Mond started all 36 games in Fisher’s first three seasons in College Station. But since 2021, five different quarterbacks have made starts, the most in the SEC. During that span, the Aggies have had 15 games with fewer than 200 passing yards.
In the seven seasons before Fisher’s arrival, Texas A&M produced nine first-round draft picks. In the six years since, despite signing 70 ESPN 300 players, the fourth most in the FBS behind Alabama, Georgia and Ohio State, it has had one: Kenyon Green, a guard. A&M has produced just two skill-position draftees that signed with Fisher: Isaiah Spiller, a fourth-rounder at running back last year and De’Von Achane in the third round this season.
Other schools made Fisher’s stagnant offense a point of emphasis. Johntay Cook II, a Texas high school receiver who was No. 32 in the 2023 ESPN 300, told On3 during his recruitment it was a concern.
“A&M has the players but not the scheme,” Cook said. “I mean A&M is running like the Wishbone offense. It’s cool and all, but if Jimbo opened it up that would be serious.”
Cook ended up signing with Texas.
But that wasn’t the only recruiting problem. Fisher prized talent above all, as most coaches do. But there were several high-profile players who committed to A&M who couldn’t stay out of trouble.
Five-star cornerback Denver Harris was suspended twice, then transferred to LSU, where he is on scholarship and in school, but not practicing with the team because of disciplinary issues. Four-star corner Smoke Bouie and five-star wide receiver Chris Marshall were suspended and transferred. Bouie has since been dismissed at Georgia and Marshall was removed from the Ole Miss roster and is now at Kilgore College, a junior college in East Texas.
Sources said discipline was a recurring issue at A&M, with Fisher preferring to let his players lead the locker room. A former player spoke of “individualism” on the roster, with players often not being punished for missing meetings or being late.
“There was 100% a lack of discipline, a lack of accountability,” a former player said.
Last season, Fisher suspended Stewart, Bouie, Marshall and Harris for the Miami game because of a curfew violation. Harris, Marshall and offensive lineman PJ Williams were suspended indefinitely for a locker room incident before the South Carolina game.
Since the Aggies signed the No. 1 class in the country in 2022, they have gone 11-11. Sources at Texas A&M indicated there was a concern that if Fisher had remained, the exodus into the transfer portal would have been significant. The Aggies were in a no-win situation, so they made the move early in hopes that a new coach could rerecruit the roster.
“The assessment that I delivered was that we are not reaching our full potential,” Bjork said at a news conference of a conversation with the Texas A&M’s president, Gen. Mark A. Welsh. “We are not in the championship conversation and something was not quite right about our direction and the plan.”
FISHER GOT OFF to a rocky start when he first arrived in Texas and met with a 7-on-7 coach in the Houston area. This immediately raised eyebrows among the Texas High School Coaches Association, the most powerful group of its kind in the country, which had encouraged “straight-line recruiting,” going through the player’s high school coaches, rather than private trainers.
“It was just a matter of not really knowing the climate and how we’ve been working hard to keep that element out of Texas,” D.W. Rutledge, the organization’s executive director, told The Dallas Morning News in Dec. 2017.
When Mack Brown arrived at Texas, he extended a welcome to high school coaches, hiring Dallas Carter’s Bruce Chambers to his first staff, and keeping him on board for 16 years. Brown was a fixture at the THSCA convention, sending every one of his coaches to shake hands and invite coaches to campus.
Every year at the coaches’ convention, there is a keynote panel that includes every Division I coach in the state. This year, Fisher was the only coach who didn’t show. His presence was expected and his absence was not explained. That raised eyebrows across Texas.
“I just believe that if you coach in this state, you need to know when the Texas High School Coaches Association convention takes place and you need to be present,” said Lee Wiginton, the head coach at Allen High School and the past president of THSCA. “Texas A&M is a prestigious program in our great state. When their head football coach doesn’t attend our convention, it’s simply not a good look in the eyes of the Texas high school coaches.”
Fisher was the only coach in the state in recent years not to do interviews or appear on podcasts with Dave Campbell’s Texas Football magazine, often called the Bible of football in the state (and a publication that put Fisher on the cover when he arrived in College Station). Sources spoke of their surprise that Fisher didn’t offer a scholarship to John Paul Richardson, a wide receiver who is the son of Aggies great Bucky Richardson. Richardson instead signed with Oklahoma State and has since transferred to TCU. He had 49 catches for 503 yards last season. On A&M’s roster, only Stewart, who had 53 catches for 649 yards last season, surpassed those numbers.
The Aggies started to see comparisons to all the stories they’d heard from Florida State before Fisher headed to College Station. “Jimbo was adamant that he wasn’t going to shake hands and kiss babies,” one influential FSU booster told ESPN in 2020.
Compared to Texas, which currently sits at No. 7 in the College Football Playoff rankings and will join Texas A&M in the SEC next year, the Aggies felt like they were “stuck in neutral” according to Bjork, and couldn’t afford to take any more chances.
The early signing period and the opening of the portal were coming quickly. There was a bowl game to contend with in the middle of that. There were staffing vacancies that needed to be filled. (After recruiting the historic 2022 class, director of player personnel Marshall Malchow departed for Oregon to join Dan Lanning’s staff and Fisher replaced him with Kevin Mashack from Indiana. In June of this year, Fisher abruptly fired Mashack and did not replace him this season.) There were likely to be more coaching changes, particularly along the offensive line. Bjork said this week that he didn’t believe Fisher had the blueprint to fix all of those issues.
“How was the plan going to be executed?” Bjork said. “Was there going to be any hope? Were we going to have the right performance next year? I didn’t see all that lining up for success.”
In the end, the Aggies were tired of being embarrassed. And so they paid Fisher more than triple the largest buyout in college football history. Bjork compared the program to a car driving too slow in the fast lane and holding everyone back.
With Fisher out of the way, Bjork says the Aggies will learn their lessons from the contract and the extension. They’re focused on finding the right fit, rather than worrying about winning a news conference or making a splash hire.
“You take the spirit, you take the passion that’s here. … We were 5-4 going into our last home game and we had 103,000 people that showed up on a Saturday night to support our team,” Bjork told ESPN. “There’s no other place like that. And so if you couple that enthusiasm, those resources, what we have to offer in the facilities world, the NIL world, all the support that people receive here at Texas A&M…”
Wiginton said Fisher’s departure offers the Aggies a chance to find someone who will take pride in his role in Texas. Bjork said it’s a chance to get a coach who embraces the current state of college football and to start over with a clean slate.
“It’s going to be a positive environment,” Bjork said. “We’re going to hire the right coach. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.”
Gerrit Cole‘s season is over, now that he is headed for Tommy John surgery, and the New York Yankees will have to find a way to replicate the production of a Cy Young Award-winning pitcher, someone who is likely to one day make a speech on induction day in Cooperstown.
But this is not a case of a team being blindsided by an injury. Past injuries are the most predictive indicators for future injuries, and after Cole missed nearly the first three months of last season with nerve inflammation in his right elbow, the Yankees knew the chances of losing him were heightened. Their handling of his contract situation last fall was a strong indicator of the uncertainty around Cole.
The pitcher and his agent, Scott Boras, opted out of the last four years of his contract, while asking that the Yankees exercise a $36 million option for the 2029 season, effectively adding a fifth year to his four-year, $144 million deal. Owner Hal Steinbrenner and GM Brian Cashman declined to do so, firmly holding the line, and days later, Cole returned to the Yankees without any augmentation of his contract. While the Yankees hoped Cole’s elbow would remain functional, as Masahiro Tanaka’s elbow did following a diagnosis of a partially torn ligament in 2014, they weren’t willing to bet another $36 million on it.
But that doesn’t help them very much right now, when they have lost two starting pitchers to significant arm injuries: Before Cole went down, Luis Gil — the American League Rookie of the Year last season — suffered a lat strain this spring that will keep him sidelined for much of the 2025 season. Max Fried, signed to a $218 million contract over the winter to improve a good rotation, will now be the de facto ace, in front of right-handers Clarke Schmidt and left-hander Carlos Rodon. A month ago, there was a lot of speculation about whether Marcus Stroman would be traded, given his standing as the sixth starter behind a five-man rotation, and now Stroman is needed as the No. 4 starter.
Cashman’s habit is to be patient — to weigh internal solutions before diving into another free agent signing or trade. When Cole was sidelined last spring, the Yankees thought Will Warren might step into his spot in the rotation, and instead, Gil surprisingly emerged to fill in for Cole and was one of the league’s best starting pitchers in the first half.
This year, Warren is having a very good spring, having allowed just two hits and a run in eight innings of work, with two walks and 11 strikeouts. Warren, an eighth-round pick out of Southeast Louisiana in 2021, is the front-runner to move into the Yankees’ rotation.
Just as the Yankees continue to weigh market options for hitting help while Giancarlo Stanton is attempting to work his way back from elbow trouble, they will consider free agent possibilities such as veteran right-hander Kyle Gibson. The Yankees paid for insurance on Cole’s contract, and so they will recoup some portion of the salary they owe him; typically, that rate is about 75%. His contract still counts against their competitive balance tax total, but the insurance money will significantly offset the luxury tax they will have to pay for the addition of any replacement: The Yankees are taxed dollar for dollar, 100%, for any additional player salaries they take on. A new $5 million player costs the Yankees $10 million.
Eventually, their best alternatives, if needed, could be through the trade market, and maybe that turns out to be the Miami Marlins‘ Sandy Alcantara, the 2022 NL Cy Young Award winner who is back after an elbow reconstruction. Under the terms of a deal he signed with the Marlins early in his career, Alcantara is making $17.3 million this year and $17.3 million next season, and there is a $21 million option in his deal for 2027.
The Marlins are not expected to contend this year and have been in a cost-cutting mode since Peter Bendix took over the team’s baseball operations after the 2023 season. Last year, the Marlins demonstrated a willingness to deal very early in the season, when they swapped batting champion Luis Arraez to the San Diego Padres in the first week of May.
But the price of a trade in April or May is usually set by the team dealing away a star, and the Yankees would have to pay a big price in prospects in the spring after a rough year for their farm system, which is generally regarded as thin by other teams and ranked No. 21 in Kiley McDaniel’s preseason system rankings. Additionally, the Yankees would presumably compete against other teams if and when the Marlins look to trade Alcantara, leaving them at the same disadvantage they faced when trying to pry Garrett Crochet away from the Chicago White Sox — before Chicago dealt him to the Boston Red Sox.
Over the course of the summer, Gil could return from the injured list, and other pitchers could emerge on the trade market as some teams drift out of contention. If the Toronto Blue Jays struggle in the first half, they could be a key source for all kinds of needs, including starting pitchers. Jose Berrios, Kevin Gausman, Chris Bassitt and Max Scherzer might all draw interest if Toronto ever looks to rebuild and, in the Yankees’ case, is willing to deal within the division.
One or more National League West teams could end up feeding the trade market. The Padres enter this season with high expectations after nearly knocking out the Los Angeles Dodgers last summer, but if San Diego drifts behind in the playoff race, it holds two of the best impending free agents, Dylan Cease and former Yankee Michael King. Similarly, the San Francisco Giants have veteran Robbie Ray, who is under contract for $25 million this year and next, and the Arizona Diamondbacks‘ Zac Gallen will become eligible for free agency in the fall.
Likewise, in the AL West, the Mariners have so far clung to their starting pitchers, like Luis Castillo, but that could change if Seattle sinks in the standings. The Astros demonstrated their willingness to be aggressive with players nearing free agency with their trade of outfielder Kyle Tucker, and if Houston hovers around .500, it could flip Framber Valdez into the market — with his years of postseason experience attractive to contenders.
The pitching market could be flush with options in a few months. And the Yankees might wait until then to make a move to cover for Cole’s absence.
ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the Washington Wizards from 2014 to 2016 and the Washington Nationals from 2016 to 2018 for The Washington Post before covering the Los Angeles Dodgers and MLB for the Los Angeles Times from 2018 to 2024.
New York Yankees right-hander Gerrit Cole will undergo Tommy John surgery, the team announced Monday, ending his 2025 season before it began and leaving the club staggering from another blow as it prepares to defend its American League pennant.
The decision to have the surgery, which will sideline Cole for the 2025 season and at least part of the 2026 season, was made after seeking a second opinion from Dr. Neal ElAttrache on Monday. Cole will undergo the procedure Tuesday at the Cedars-Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute in Los Angeles. In a statement, the club said that “further updates will occur post surgery.”
Cole started two games this spring, giving up seven runs across six innings. On Thursday, he gave up six runs on five hits, including two home runs, over 2⅔ innings to the Minnesota Twins. He said he felt an “alarming” amount of pain that night into Friday morning, prompting him to notify the team and undergo imaging tests, which revealed a torn ulnar collateral ligament.
Cole, 34, went through the same series of stressful events a year ago: Elbow pain in mid-March, tests and opinions from doctors. But the result was different. Cole was diagnosed with nerve irritation and edema and, instead of surgery, he rested and rehabbed. He made his season debut on June 19 and pitched through the World Series without a setback.
In a statement he posted on Instagram later Monday, Cole said the surgery was a “necessary next step for my career,” adding that he has “a lot left to give, and I’m fully committed to the work ahead. I’ll attack my rehab every day and support the 2025 Yankees each step of the way. I love this game, I love competing, and I can’t wait to be back on the mound — stronger than ever.”
The ace logged 124 innings over 22 starts between the regular season and playoffs, tossing at least six innings in three of his five postseason outings. He then opted to alter his offseason throwing program by starting it earlier to continue his positive momentum. He said he was “in a really good spot” compared to other years at the start of camp.
But less than a month later, his season has been declared over.
Cole’s injury is the second major blow to the Yankees’ starting rotation this spring after Luis Gil, the reigning AL Rookie of the Year, sustained a lat strain that was expected to sideline him for at least three months.
Without the two right-handers, Max Fried, Carlos Rodon and Clarke Schmidt will top the Yankees’ starting rotation. Marcus Stroman, who was notably not expected to make the Opening Day rotation, is projected to slide into the No. 4 spot with Will Warren, a rookie who made his debut last season, and Carlos Carrasco, a soon-to-be-38-year-old veteran in camp as a non-roster invite, as the leading internal candidates to round out the quintet.
Other options in camp include right-hander Allan Winans, who has eight career starts on his résumé, and left-hander Brent Headrick, a starter in the minors who has never started a game in the majors.
The Yankees could also opt to sign a free agent — veterans Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn are among those available — or swing a trade for an established starter.
Cole, a six-time All-Star, won the 2023 AL Cy Young Award and was the runner-up two other seasons. He has tallied at least 200 innings in six of his 10 full seasons (not including last year and the COVID-shortened 2020 season). He is as close to an old-school frontline workhorse in his prime that exists in baseball. It’s why the Yankees chose to sign Cole, a lifelong Yankees fan, to a nine-year, $324 million deal with a no-trade clause in December 2019 — the largest contract given to a pitcher at the time.
The agreement included a player opt-out after last season that the Yankees could’ve voided by attaching another year and $36 million to the four years and $144 million remaining on his contract. Cole exercised the opt out, but he never became a free agent and didn’t receive the extra year. Instead, the two sides agreed to continue as if Cole didn’t opt out two days later, keeping him under contract through the 2028 season at $36 million per year.
The Yankees have insurance on Cole’s contract, which will allow them to recoup some money for the time he’s out.
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Yoshinobu Yamamoto struck out seven over five impressive innings and Shohei Ohtani ripped a 118.5 mph double during the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ penultimate game of the spring schedule on Monday.
Yamamoto threw 75 pitches against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Camelback Ranch. His fastball touched 97 mph and four of the seven strikeouts came on his splitter. The Japanese right-hander gave up one run on four hits in his final spring training start, walking one as the Dodgers went on to win 6-2.
Yamamoto is scheduled to start the Dodgers’ regular-season opener against the Chicago Cubs in Tokyo on March 18. Ohtani is expected to be the designated hitter.
Ohtani’s third extra-base hit of the spring came in the first inning and the reigning National League MVP jogged into second base for the easy double. He grounded out in the second and struck out in the fourth.
Ohtani is 6 of 17 this spring (.353) with two doubles and a homer. The 30-year-old is trying to bounce back from offseason shoulder surgery.
Rookie right-hander Roki Sasaki is scheduled to start the final spring training game for the Dodgers on Tuesday. He’s expected to start the second Dodgers-Cubs game in Japan on March 19.