Texas A&M football plays USC for the first time in decades Friday in the Las Vegas Bowl. A ninth win would be quite the punctuation mark for Mike Elko's first year as head coach for the Aggies. Former head coaches Jimbo Fisher and Kevin Sumlin, Elko's predecessors, accomplished a nine-win season a total of four times.

Las Vegas began blooming on the Nevada desert nearly a century ago thanks in part to the building of the Hoover Dam, and now Texas A&M coach Mike Elko hopes his program’s holidays sojourn to the bright lights on the sand helps bring a similar mushrooming for the Aggies.