Five burning questions for Texas A&M football for Las Vegas Bowl vs. USC
Texas A&M football is getting ready for their final game of the year, gearing up to face off with the USC Trojans in Las Vegas. The Ags and Trojans will have quite a late kick tomorrow evening, but I still expect this game to generate a lot of interest among college football fans.
With the way college football works nowadays, there are a lot of unknowns when coming into bowl season. Here are the questions that the Aggies need to answer positively in this game.
Can A&M take advantage of USC rush defense?
The Trojans enter this game with a pretty poor rush defense by just about any metric— certainly for a team with the amount of talent that Lincoln Riley's squad has. They are 53rd in the nation in rush yards per game allowed and 88th in yards per carry allowed.
The advanced stats are no rosier for the Trojans. They rank in the 40th percentile of all teams in percentage of average YPC allowed, meaning they are quite poor at preventing teams from reaching their average yards per carry. They are also in the 54th percentile of rushing success rate allowed, meaning they are bad at putting teams behind the chains on rushing plays.
To go along with all of this, they are in the 10th percentile in tackle-for-loss rate— the rate of plays that are TFLs for a defense. The Aggies, for comparison, are in the 85th percentile in this metric.
All this adds up to say that the Aggies should be able to run the ball on the Trojans. With their room consisting of Daniels, Owens, and Smith at this point, they need to be able to impose their will up front.