3 Takeaways From Brutal Loss to Ole Miss by Texas A&M Football

Takeaways for Texas A&M Football After Another Road Loss

Strangely enough, I feel somewhat zen after this latest loss for Texas A&M football. I guess I’m not quite sure why that is, necessarily—maybe I’ve just grown used to how things go in these games? Maybe, in a statement that will probably anger half of you or more, it has to do with the fact that the Rangers just won the World Series for the first time? Maybe it’s just the improved offensive output that we saw in this game?

I can’t really say. What I can say is that, moving forward, we definitely have a lot to sort through. It feels too often under Jimbo the last few years that I come to these articles, though bearing a loss, and try to take a look at the repeatable and sustainable factors that lead to winning; the things that reliably create the conditions under which points are scored. The non-random aspects of the game. The things that you can control and improve as a team. I take a look at these things to try to examine how we should feel about the team moving forward rather than looking back. There are time for articles to be written that examine what has happened with a team rather than looking forward to what might happen. Those can happen in the same one, of course, but this weekly piece usually falls in the latter category.

There are pithy little things you can say to help the sting of a loss like this. They’re not hard to come up with—”Texas A&M football, without their starting quarterback, top receiver, starting corners, and, for the second half of the game, their best running back, took a top-10 Ole Miss team to the wire on the road.” It’s true as far as it goes. But there’s a difference that must be observed that has to do with the intent of a statement like this: is it intended to justify what happened in the previous game, or is it intended to speak to the quality of the team moving forward and what we might expect out of them? That’s the difference between a “moral victory” or “cope” or whatever you want to call it and analysis of the team. In that vein, then, let’s try to analyze what we saw and what we can take away as we move forward.