Advanced stats show Texas A&M football's upcoming daunting road tests in 2025

Advanced stats show Texas A&M football staring down the barrel of stiff road schedule in 2025

In the leadup to the 2024 season for Texas A&M football, the storyline was all about one thing: the four big home games. The Aggies had contests at Kyle Field against four premier opponents, spanning the length of the season, that many thought would decide the fate of the 2025 campaign.

Of course, what really ended up deciding the tenor of last year was a November collapse. The Aggies ended up 2-2 in their key home games, but went 0-2 on the road in winnable November contests.

This upcoming year, though, the switch flips. The Aggies will have several key road games and all of their "easier" opponents (if you can call them that in the SEC) will be coming to Kyle Field.

This is borne out with a look at the advanced stats. Bill Connelly's SP+ system has been calculated for the first time this offseason, and the initial numbers have the Aggies in an advantageous spot— the problem is that a lot of A&M's opponents still manage to rank above them.

You can see that the 12th-rated Aggies will have to manage road trips to no. 5 Notre Dame, no. 7 Texas, and no. 10 LSU, not to mention no. 15 Missouri. That's no easy feat at all, especially considering that in that aforementioned 2024 collapse, many of the poor performances we saw came on the road.

The Ags will be on the receiving end of visits from no. 16 South Carolina, no. 17 Florida, and no. 23 Auburn this upcoming season, as well. We can't take those games for granted by any means, but it's increasingly beginning to seem that the story of 2025 will be told by the way the Aggies are able to perform in those key road contests— not despite the Aggies' struggles in the latter half of 2024, but precisely because of them.