With Texas A&M football now only a few days away from finally kicking off, anticipation is at an all-time high. Fans are excited to see the team put toe to leather at last and, no doubt, overreact to this first game from the Aggies.
As opposed to last year, the Aggies are opening with an easier opponent, so most expect this to go A&M's way in the end. Of course, one consequence of that is that if the Aggies aren't particularly dominant, it will set off alarm bells for some fans.
Week one is probably the time that the advanced statistical projections are at their least accurate, of course, but it's still worth consulting them to see if the Aggies are expected to be that dominant. So, for the first time of the 2025 season, let's see what the numbers expect of the Aggies.
SP+ has Texas A&M dominating offensively
Bill Connelly's SP+ system sees the Aggies taking down the Roadrunners by a score of 40-20. Connelly's system uses a combination of success rate and explosiveness to measure team quality, but right now, of course, it's highly reliant on returning production numbers and projections from last season.
Those preseason projections will fade out as the year goes along, but they'll never quite fully go away— as Connelly himself has written before, keeping those in the formula actually makes the system more predictive, as counterintuitive as that may seem to some.
If this comes to pass, I think it will probably be disappointing to some Texas A&M fans. UTSA is a good offensive team, but the final margin being 20 will not be enough for a selection of fans— after all, Vegas has the spread around 22.5 points right now.
FEI has a slightly lower-scoring yet still decisive victory
Brian Fremeau's system, FEI, sees the Aggies winning by a 35-14 mark. That's a more traditional football score, of course, but probably undersells the Aggie offense just slightly.
FEI is built on a points per drive model, as opposed to success rate like Connelly's SP+. It's a little more intuitive in that way, but while SP+ measures the factors that lead most reliably to scoring, FEI measures actual production.
That can be helpful in certain situations: maybe there's a team that is great at creating the conditions in which scoring usually happens, but they fail to capitalize on their opportunities more often than not.
This is still a dominant win, but even one more touchdown by the Aggies— making the final mark 42-14— would feel better for fans. This is a good calibrating expectation, though: if the Ags can outperform these projections, it will mean that they are, in fact, better than most have projected.