Texas A&M Hires Jim Schlossnagle Of TCU As Next Head Coach

Image credit: Vandy coach Tim Corbin and TCU coach Jim Schlossnagle (Photo by Victor Decolongon/Getty Images)

Texas A&M on Wednesday hired Jim Schlossnagle, the 2016 Coach of the Year, as its next head coach. 

Schlossnagle, 50, is known as one of the top coaches in the sport. He built Texas Christian into a power over the last 18 seasons, leading the Horned Frogs to the College World Series five times, including four straight from 2014-17. He also guided them to the NCAA Tournament in all but two of his seasons as head coach and won conference titles in three different leagues, as he helped TCU navigate conference realignment to the Big 12.

While Schlossnagle did not win a national championship at TCU, it’s about the only level he didn’t reach in Fort Worth, and that’s incredible when you consider the program’s lack of history before he arrived. 

Prior to 2004, Schlossnagle’s first season after coming over from Nevada-Las Vegas, where he led the Rebels to regionals in 2003, the Horned Frogs had been to the NCAA Tournament just twice, in 1956 and 1994. It had never won a regional, and even in moving from the Southwest Conference to the WAC to Conference USA, its 1994 SWC title stood as the only one since 1972. 

Schlossnagle had the Frogs back in the postseason in 2004 and ended up getting them there in each of his first nine seasons at the helm, along the way establishing the program as the class of the Mountain West Conference. That helped set the stage for TCU to transition successfully to the Big 12 where, after a down season in 2013, the team was back to competing for national titles right away and kicked off its run of four straight CWS appearances. 

Now, Schlossnagle will head a few hours south to take over at A&M. Expectations are high in College Station. After all, they moved on from former coach Rob Childress despite the fact he made the NCAA Tournament 13 straight times before a last place finish this season in the SEC West. 

Childress and his predecessor, Mark Johnson, were both successful coaches at A&M, with a total of five trips to Omaha between them, but Schlossnagle’s task is doing what neither of those coaches could do and deliver a national title to a proud program that wants to be considered among the elite in the sport. Using what Childress accomplished as a starting point for a new coach and expecting him to better that is a high bar to clear, but Schlossnagle is ready for that level of expectation and scrutiny. 

Schlossnagle had explored leaving TCU before – he interviewed at Texas and Mississippi State in recent years – but had not been compelled to leave Fort Worth. Now, he will step into the toughest conference in college baseball and try to lead the Aggies to the top of the sport.