The good, the bad, and the ugly from Texas A&M's win over UTSA: Where the Aggies shone and where they need to improve
Texas A&M's win over UTSA last night was nothing if not a game that generated a lot of discourse. Sometimes, you have pretty boring or boilerplate openers— this game was anything but.
There are a lot of good things and a few concerning things from this game— let's break it all down here.
The good from Texas A&M vs UTSA
There's actually quite a lot here to say about the defense, believe it or not. As Mike Elko mentioned in his postgame presser, the Aggie defense had a good day in coverage downfield, which was a huge issue last year, with really the only explosive pass play they allowed being against the backups.
We'll get to the rush defense in a little bit, but it's worth mentioning that they all but entirely shut the Roadrunners down after that first play in the third quarter— and even that play seemed like something Elko wasn't too worried about.
One thing that stood out to a lot of people was the fourth-and-goal play call by Collin Klein. The motion and movement post snap confused the UTSA front, and Theo came open for an easy pitch-and-catch touchdown. That's the kind of creativity a lot of fans wanted to see down the stretch of last year— it was certainly present in particular games, but it's the Texas game that stands out in most fans' minds.
The biggest takeaway here? The receivers are as advertised. Mario Craver and KC Concepcion lit it up all night, both on offense and special teams in Concepcion's case. We didn't see as much out of Ashton Bethel-Roman, but with the amount of hype he's gotten, I feel confident he'll get some more attention before long.
The bad from Texas A&M vs UTSA
The headline here is the aforementioned rush defense in the first half and into the first play of the third quarter. There were missed fits that led to some big runs for the Roadrunners, which really rankled a lot of fans.
I'll say this: it's better for it to be missed fits than for the Aggies to be getting consistently beat up front on a physical level, but those kinds of errors are what lead to the explosive runs we saw last night. You have to have your guys in position in order to defend those, and there were more mental errors than you'd like to see.
You expect a level of that in game one, and they did seem to shore it up at one point, but it's redolent of the issues this defense had last year: pretty good down-to-down, but they gave up the big play far too often. Hopefully, this is more of a blip than a consistent issue going forward.
The ugly from Texas A&M vs UTSA
I've talked about it several times now, but the ugly in this game has to be the penalties. Texas A&M had several drives killed by holding penalties on offense, which didn't hurt them here, but they need to shore that up.
Again, in game one of a season, there's going to be some messiness. But this is the biggest area that fans should be watching for against Utah State next week: how clean is the operation on offense?
The only other thing I could add here is Marcel missing KC on that long pass where there was no one within about 40 yards of him. It looked like he just got excited and airmailed it a bit, but with no defenders nearby, you have to let that one hang in the air a bit to make sure you don't overthrow him.