The A&M $18Billion endowment is across the entire Texas A&M system which includes 11 universities. College Station obviously is the bulk of that, but they also have 73,000 total students, and 57,000 undergrads on campus. Tech has 48k students but less than 20k are undergrads, and a huge chunk of the graduate population are online students. The 2 are not even comparable. Just the undergraduate population at Texas A&M is larger than the capacity of Bobby Dodd Stadium. The cultures of the schools and their students are entirely different.
Did Manziel move the needle at A&M? Maybe. After he won the Heisman in 2012 A&M has failed to reach 10 wins again. They’ve paid a lot of money for very little results. In today’s era of college football having somebody like Manziel on your team would cost millions of dollars per year. Do you really think Tech can play in that market? Carson Beck is supposedly demanding $4M, he’s not even close to bringing a Manziel level of hype. For football to truly move the needle at Tech ever again we have to beat UGA more than we lose to them, and given the current environment I don’t think that’s possible. Their football budget is higher than our entire athletic department.