In a game that many Texas A&M football fans are watching with interest due to the playoff implications, Indiana is currently losing big to Ohio State. This is a matchup of two teams at the top of the Big 10 record-wise, but two teams who have pretty opposite strengths of schedule thus far.
This is the first tough team that Indiana has faced, while Ohio State is significantly more battle-tested at this point. In fact, as Indiana has ascended to 10-0, this is the third game against a top-5 opponent that Ohio State has played yet this season.
To highlight that fact, the broadcast went to a timely trivia question, as is a staple on college football broadcasts. It went like this: what was the last team to face three top-5 AP opponents in a single season?
Joel Klatt, infamous among Aggie fans for his constant ribbing of the Maroon and White, opined at first that it must be a SEC West or Big 10 East team, given the difficulty of those divisions. He finally settled on LSU—which the answer indeed was, pointing to their 2011 season.
Here's the problem: that's an incorrect answer.
Texas A&M football in 2019 had one of the most difficult schedules I've ever seen a college football team take on. The Aggies played three different teams ranked no. 1 in the AP Poll: Clemson early on, Alabama in the middle of the year, and LSU in the final game of the year.
That's not to mention that they played on the road at no. 4 Georgia and hosted a top-10 Auburn team. Unsurprisingly, they lost all five of those games, and won every single other one.
So it wasn't just three AP top-5 teams; it was four. And yet the Aggies were overlooked.
The only way I can make sense of this is that the question must have meant exactly three AP top-5 teams, which was not explicitly stated, or that it meant both teams must be top-5. Again, that was not explicitly outlined in the question.
This is more than likely a harmless oversight on the part of the stats department, but it remains a fact that not enough is made of that difficult 2019 schedule for A&M.