Texas A&M Football: 3 Takeaways After the Auburn Loss

Sleeves and the path forward for this Texas A&M football program

As I’m sure you can tell, the above photo was not taken last night.  You would be able to tell that because the above photo is of wide receiver Moose Muhammad catching a football in the course of the game while wearing sleeves.

Now, this is apparently a rule that Jimbo has had in place for cold/wet games for a while so as to increase ball security.  No other skill position players had sleeves on for the game, and, according to Billy Liucci on Texags, both coaches and players were asking Moose to take the sleeves off.

Now that Moose has tweeted about it, I feel like the odds are good we will hear from Jimbo in Monday’s presser about what exactly went down, as it’s no longer an in-house issue.  If the facts are just that this rule has been in place and Moose flatly refused to abide by it, then the right decision was made to sit him.  You can’t change the rules you have in place depending on how good the player is that breaks them.  That’s how a culture deteriorates.

As far as where we go from here, UMass could not have arrived at a better time.

Actually, that’s not true.  I wish we had played UMass earlier.  Maybe a win, regardless of who it comes against, would have greased the wheels for this Texas A&M football team in such a way that chemistry and confidence would be in much higher supply than it is currently.

Things just seem to happen to this Texas A&M football team at the worst possible times.  No sooner do you get the linchpin of your offensive line back than you lose your top receiver for the year.  No sooner do you find the steadying hand at quarterback than he goes down for the year.  No sooner does your passing game emerge than said linchpin of your offensive line tears his ACL.  No sooner do you finally come back home from a nightmarish three-game road trip and finally start the quarterback of the future than he, along with many other key contributors, come down with a terrible bout of the flu.  No sooner do you play the worst Power Five team on your schedule than you lose your most dynamic offensive weapon and look completely hapless on offense.

There’s a lot that’s gone wrong this year that’s not on coaching or execution.  But the coaching and execution have been, for the most part, pretty bad.

Let’s let the team get back home, get a win, even if it is against the worst team in FBS (and yes, also worse than Sam Houston) and see what happens against LSU.