Dallas Cowboys Rumors: Aggies Interest in Dan Quinn, Deion Sanders & Dan Campbell as Texas A&M Hires?

FRISCO - The ball got rolling in this particular category when Stephen A. Smith - who knows virtually nothing about college football - touted Deion Sanders as the next coach at Texas A&M. The ESPN had only a little logic and not a bit of evidence, but away he ranted.

The ball is still rolling with Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio floating Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell as replacement for Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M. Florio's logic in why Campbell would leave his 7-2 Detroit Lions team to launch a rebuild at A&M? Campbell is a Texas native who played at A&M. And that's about it.

And now a fresh guess: One media guy is connecting Dallas Cowboys defensive coordinator Dan Quinn with the Aggies job. The writer/site's logic? "I have no inside information on this,'' he begins ...

And that's where we will slam on the brakes.

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Our Aggies SI coverage here - with boots on the ground in College Station - includes a "hot board'' with all sorts of possible names on it. But attached to all of this speculation, we will firmly suggest, should come some logic ... and maybe even some responsible reporting.

Deion says he's not leaving Boulder any time soon, and as his two sons are there with him on the team, "Coach Prime's'' word probably merits some respect.

Campbell? He's been in the coaching business for 14 years ... all of them in the NFL. If he has all along harbored a preference to coach at A&M instead of in the NFL, he's kept it quite a secret.

And Quinn? In this space, there are no secrets here. He was a University of Florida top assistant for a brief time a decade ago. A decade before that, he'd worked his way up to being a top assistant at Hoffstra.

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And since then, for the bulk of 23 years, he's been an NFL ... and one of the most respected ones, with a Super Bowl on his resume (as the head coach in Atlanta) and with an offseason that promises, as was the case in the previous two offseasons, to be filled with interviews for NFL head coaching vacancies. (The idea that he might even succeed present Dallas coach Mike McCarthy is not a new one, of course.)

In neither of those two seasons did he interview for a college job.

Most of the wild ideas about Deion, Dan and Dan are about the money available to a college coach, especially with "all the oil money'' at A&M, as the national media loves to put it; Jimbo is about to get a $77 million check just to not coach there anymore.

And we're not foolish enough to dismiss the power of the paycheck. But when the media "scatter-shoots'' like this, we're also smart enough to explore the "why's.''

With what team did Deion most prominently make his football mark? With what team did Campbell spent a chunk of his time as a player? With what team is Quinn presently associated with in a most high-profile way?

Cowboys. Cowboys. Cowboys.