3 Takeaways from Tough Loss for Texas A&M Football
Texas A&M football fans gave the Aggie team all they could to help win this one. Multiple false start penalties resulting from the consummately intimidating environs aided the Aggie defense on more than one occasion. The crowd made an impact on this one to about the highest degree that you could have hoped.
And, frustratingly, it was almost enough.
As I wrote yesterday evening, this was a game of missed opportunities for the Aggies that culminated in the biggest missed opportunity that Jimbo has had since arriving in College Station—the chance to take control of the SEC West. Everything was in front of the Aggies coming into the game, and it seemed like they were rising to the occasion as they weathered a few Alabama explosives and took a 17-10 lead into the half. But things began to unravel in the second half; where the Aggie defense had been unrelentingly pressuring Milroe, he all of a sudden had more than enough time. Where Max Johnson had been kept clean for most of the game, it was he who was facing huge amounts of pressure. The offense bogged down, the defense broke one too many times, and it resulted in an absolutely infuriatingly close loss to an Alabama team that—like it or not—you certainly should have beaten.
There were a lot of strange strategic decisions in this game. I’m not in the [headset of the coaches, so I don’t know exactly what they were thinking. I didn’t like the late-game management, for sure, but it didn’t particularly end up mattering. I think the “conservative” charge that’s being broadly leveled at Jimbo’s game management is a bit misguided (recall the fourth down stop on the first drive), but there were some things that ended up looking quite unfortunate in retrospect. It’s hard to convert some of the particulars in a game like this into things to take forward, but that’s what we’re here to do . Take forward what we can, and flush the rest.
Let’s dive in.