Three Turning Points: Texas A&M Football vs. Tennessee
Key Turning Points from Texas A&M Football vs. Tennessee
As I said in my instant reaction, this is one of the more frustrating Texas A&M football games I’ve ever seen. It held me in suspense the whole time, but in a sort of foreboding way. Things just kept mounting in a fashion that made me feel like they were headed to disaster. That struck in the form of a special teams touchdown on a day where the Aggie defense was absolutely stifling one of the more high-powered offenses in the conference and country.
I think that’s the part that is most frustrating. Under Mike Elko and now again under DJ Durkin, the story has all too often been that of a great defense that keeps the anemic offense in the game pretty much right up until the very end. This is even with the fact that Texas A&M football has a head coach who is an offensively-minded guy. He’s hired a veritable brain trust in not only Bobby Petrino, but also assistants like Jim Chaney, James Coley, and more. The offense looks fine enough in blowouts. But when was the last time Texas A&M football won a shootout? 2021 Alabama?
That said, I’m not sure we can say anymore it is the play calling. The plays are there—watching the film shows you that. But the plays have been there for the past six years. The Aggies started off the year with a quarterback who finally looked like he could run the offense and find those plays—a guy with a quick trigger and the ability to make every throw on the field. But if you need a guy like that to make an offense work, and it will look entirely broken if literally anyone else is behind center, then it might be time to change things up.
But now what we have is a lot of low margin for error football. Which, on some level, you’d have to do when your ceiling drops so low. But that again goes back to the fact that you should be able to adapt this system to fit the strengths of a guy as talented as Max. Make no mistake—he is talented, despite how he’s looked over the last two weeks. As things stand, though, that’s hard to see.
I’ll be writing more on this later this week. Stay tuned! For now, though, let’s talk about what the pressure points were from this game.