The death of Dennis Franchione has brought back a lot of unpleasant memories, but has also proven to be a reminder of how far the football program has come.

By the time R.C. Slocum was fired, there was no question that the program had become stale and outdated. There wasn’t enough money for the program, the athletic director was asleep at the wheel and Mack Brown had the Texas money machine going brr brr brr while Aggies were happy to be Aggies.

I remember walking through the old weight room on the west side of Kyle Field in the early 2000’s and it was an absolute dump. I felt bad for the players — especially after seeing what Texas now had.

Then it looked like Aggie football program was about to return to the days of the 1980s and early 1990s where there enough angry boosters to spend money. They paid to replace Slocum with the top coach available: Franchione, then the coach at Alabama. Those were heady days, where just about everyone was excited. I remember a column on what was then CBS Sportsline praising Franchione as the best combination of coach and recruiter in the game and closed with the line, “The Aggies went all in and put everything on Maroon.”

It was a bad fit from the beginning and never got better. Fran brought in his merry band, including that scumbag Mike McKenzie, who tried to push Alan Cannon totally out of handling football public relations and attacked fans who dared criticize his boss.

Franchione never adapted to the pressure cooker that is Aggie football. People would argue that Alabama is just as tough if not tougher, but Fran was in an era of good feelings because people understood he had to rebuild a train wreck left by Mike DuBose. Franchione took over from R.C. and the program got worse.

Year 1 was a disaster, losing to Baylor and 77-0. Fran redshirted nearly the entire freshman class, so he got a pass. After all, this is Dennis Franchione, who won 10 games at TCU and turned Alabama around. The next year was fun to watch on offense, with Reggie McNeal throwing for 2,740 yards while running for another 786. But the team only got to 7-5 and things went to hell in the Cotton Bowl when Tennessee crushed A&M 38-7.

And Franchione drew the entirely wrong conclusions from that game. Tennessee, was bigger, stronger, faster and more talented. Fran decided it was time to make A&M bigger and stronger, but without SEC talent. So that started the Night of Champions and the era of the 240-pound wide receiver, who looked absolutely shredded and could be covered by a linebacker.

He switched to the option with passing quarterbacks. McNeal’s total offense dropped by nearly 900 yards while playing in 10 of 12 games. A&M fell back to 5-6. The next season was the only really “good” one, and A&M went 9-3 before being demolished in the Holiday Bowl 45-10 by Cal.

2007 was the end, sealed by losing four out of five conference games in which they didn’t score more than 28 points in any of them (the 40-28 loss to Missouri being the only one where they scored in the twenties) before jumping up and knocking off Texas 38-30 in a game where Franchione actually let offensive coordinator Les Koenning, like, you know, call the plays.

He was fired by Bill Byrne, who had replaced the somnolent Wally Groff after Franchione’s hire, then gave him two pay raises before dumping him. Byrne, in typical arrogant fashion, started his postgame statements before Fran finished saying goodbye after the Texas game.

Byrne was supposed to mean business. He did — for construction companies. His motto was “Building Champions”. Under Byrne, Aggie athletics was Building Buildings (coincidentally, almost all of them are gone now). Byrne, like Franchione, was in over his head and helped reinforce the notion that A&M was the gang that couldn’t shoot straight — especially after hiring Mike Sherman three days after firing Franchione. Of all the possibilities, turning to Mike Sherman immediately?

But he knew A&M. He coached with R.C. Blah blah blah.

Don’t get me wrong; Sherm was a very nice guy. I liked him on a personal level. But he didn’t move the needle. He recruited offensive linemen and straightened Von Miller out. He convinced Johnny Manziel and Mike Evans to come to A&M — though nobody had any idea what they’d become at that point. He helped Ryan Tannehill become a top-10 NFL draft pick and Von became a Hall of Famer.

But he was out of his depth once his scripted plays ran out and he was terrible at making halftime adjustments, something anyone in Green Bay could have told them. Then, before practice once day in 2011, he said to Billy Liucci and I that he didn’t understand why A&M wanted to go to the SEC, since our more natural rivals were in the Big 12. Our jaws dropped.

A&M did go to the SEC against Byrne’s violent disapproval. He had tried to engineer a deal with DeLoss Dodds the year before that would have sent A&M, Texas, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State to the Pac-12. When it became clear that A&M was in the wind and Dodds’ “don’t worry, we’ll take care of you” comment became public, nobody wanted to go to the Pac or do anything with Texas. Then the SEC came calling for the first time and the Aggies were within hours of going that way and Texas going to the Pac. before “political considerations” killed the deal totally. After the Longhorn Network became a thing, there was no way in hell A&M was sticking around, and Bowen Loftin led the move to the SEC. And Byrne “retired”.

I remember going to one practice wearing a shirt that simply said “Washington Redskins” on it. Byrne stopped me and asked if I’d become a fan under George Allen. I looked blankly at him and said Allen had been fired when I was in diapers.

Obviously, there is, and should be, great admiration for Loftin and his guts. The nerdy guy with the bowtie was the first person to show A&M really meant business and then the Johnny Manziel phenomenon happened. Aggies began to really realize what they could do with top-notch facilities, an arms race that still continues.

But Loftin made one horrible hire: the next AD, Eric Hyman. He was so useless that Wally Groff would have considered him lazy. He spent four years collecting a paycheck. And Kevin Sumlin came apart at the seams and A&M looked stupid again.

So, after doing the same thing twice — hiring two Slocum assistants — we went back to doing something we’d done twice before too: moneywhipping the best coach available. Not the best coach, the best available. Enter Jimbo Fisher.

Jimbo was not the disaster Fran was. He wasn’t the success Jackie Sherrill was, either. But when Scott Woodward went to LSU and tried to poach him, Aggies panicked like they did when Sumlin was stalked by USC six years earlier and paid him even more. Then Ross Bjork turned around and fired him two years later.

A note on Woodward and Bjork: they were largely capable and effective ADs. Bjork was ahead of the curve when it came to NIL. He also made a really dumb move in trying to hire Mark Stoops — which I’m still glad to have a small part in torpedoing. But neither looked at A&M as anything more than a stepping stone, not a destination. It worked out for Bjork. It did not work out for Woodward, who spent a whole lot of other people’s money in Baton Rouge to leave things in shambles.

Jimbo was a nice guy (to me) and could recruit. But his offense had been figured out and he was too arrogant to realize it. It became as stale as the Gulf Coast Offense with significantly better talent.

But nobody had a plan. I don’t know if Fran did; Sherman couldn’t develop his because he had an NFL mindset. Sumlin thought #YESSIR! meant something, when Manziel meant something. He was very consumed in himself. Fisher let the same issues that got him in trouble at FSU — lack of discipline and oversight — drown him at A&M.

Of the ADs, the only one with a plan was Bjork, who had his ideas halted by the NCAA on NIL and infuriated the Board of Regents with the Stoops deal. But A&M finally stumbled onto the idea that, hey, smart people are giving us money, so why don’t we hire smart people in the athletic department.

For whatever problems Mike Elko has had with this team through five games, his tenure so far has been a massive success — and he has the nation’s best recruiting class coming in (properly vetted, by the way). Trev Alberts has been an innovator as the AD. I have been very impressed by his work.

Anyway, flashing back to 20 years ago, A&M was a floundering program with limited leadership and no strategic vision. It has evolved over time as the makeup of the boosters has changed (gotten younger), the fan base has become less content with mediocrity and there’s more capable people involved with athletics.

A&M’s not there yet. It’s not where it should be. But maybe, after thrashing around in the wilderness for the better part of two decades, we’re actually on to something.

And God, I hope so.