Mike Elko

Michael Elko (born 1977) is a football coach who has been the defensive coordinator for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team since 2016.

Raised in South Brunswick, New Jersey, Elko graduated in 1995 from South Brunswick High School, where he played baseball, basketball and was the quarterback for the school's football team. He was recognized by the coaches of the Greater Middlesex Conference as the league's top quarterback in 1994 and was inducted into the school's athletic hall of fame in 2012. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he played as linebacker for the Penn Quakers football team that won the Ivy league championship in 1998.

Prior to be named as the defensive coordinator at Notre Dame, Elko had coached the defense on the sidelines for three seasons at Hofstra University, for five seasons with the Bowling Green Falcons and for three seasons with the Wake Forest Demon Deacons. During the 2016 season, Elko led Wake Forest's defense to rankings in the top 20 among all of the nearly 130 teams in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) in defensive touchdowns scored, fumbles and turnovers recovered, red zone defense, sacks and scoring defense; Alabama, Clemson and Washington, the three other FBS teams to accomplish this with their defenses, were among the four teams selected to compete in that season's College Football Playoff postseason tournament. The Fighting Irish hired Elko to replace Brian VanGorder, who had been fired the previous September after Notre Dame started the season with a 1-3 record and a defense ranked third from the bottom of the FBS.