Preseason hype is the enemy of the Texas A&M football team

The Texas A&M football team is no stranger to preseason hype. Even if the Aggies are currently approaching a century-long national championship drought, they’ve always had some of the top talent in the entire country. The team has always been a threat to win a national championship.

But oftentimes, the Aggies fall short of preseason expectations.

2021 is the perfect example of this. A&M kicked off the year ranked in the top ten and viewed as a potential College Football Playoff contender. None of that would come to fruition, as the Aggies would eventually fall out of the top-25 and decline to play in their bowl game.

This isn’t a new thing, either. The last 11 times Texas A&M began the season in the top ten, they would finish the season at a lower ranking. A majority of these occasions saw them fall out of the rankings entirely.

A&M had two seasons in the past decade that saw them finish in the AP top five. In one of those seasons, A&M began the year unranked and finished fifth. In the other, the Aggies began at 13 and finished fourth.

Should the Texas A&M football team be worried about preseason expectations?

Based on the number that I proposed in the paragraph above, the answer to this question should be a simple “yes.” The Texas A&M football team has struggled mightily when given preseason expectations to a point where it has become undeniable.

That said, it’s not so simple this year. The 2022 season holds entirely different circumstances. Specifically, those circumstances revolve around Texas A&M’s 2022 incoming class of freshmen, which is the highest-ranked class of all time.

The worry, on the other hand, is in relation to whether or not A&M’s freshmen can step up in a big enough way to warrant this preseason ranking. Look at anybody who has the Aggies in the top five — they’ll point to the incoming class of freshmen with virtually no other reasoning.

The truth is that this team is still full of question marks. The Aggies still need to fill more than a handful of positions including quarterback, tight end, linebacker, and safety.