Texas A&M or Notre Dame? It's a bag of mixed emotions for Duke with Mike Elko, Riley Leonard facing off - ESPN

DUKE QB GRAYSON LOFTIS is looking for a politically correct way to answer a fraught question, turning to teammate Jaylen Stinson for help. Instead, Stinson eggs him on, hoping to avoid having to answer himself.

There's a big Week 1 showdown between his former head coach, Mike Elko, now leading Texas A&M, and Riley Leonard, the guy Loftis shared a QB room at Duke with last year, now taking snaps at Notre Dame. Who ya got?

«I don't want to touch that one with a 10-foot pole,» Loftis says. «A zero-zero tie, I guess.»

Well, that would mean Leonard didn't throw a TD pass, right?

Loftis changes course.

«OK, 180-180,» he says, throwing up his hands.

Right. There are no good answers here.

It's an impossible choice for the Duke holdovers, but it's also something of a microcosm for modern college football — a coach and a QB, once tethered by success at one school, now going head-to-head on completely different sidelines; a matchup of A&M and Notre Dame and, perhaps, between college football's espoused values and the cold reality of its bottom line.

For Leonard, Notre Dame was a chance to play for one of college football's most storied programs in an era in which name, image and likeness dollars and NFL prospects often require the biggest stage possible. It also meant leaving the only Power 5 school to offer him a scholarship out of high school.

For Elko, the A&M job was a chance to arm himself with every resource imaginable in an era in which cash is the key to talent acquisition at a place desperate to win big. But it also meant leaving his former team under the cloak of darkness in November, with his players left to learn of his departure on social media the next morning.

For Duke — or what's left of a program that went from a