After a 13-year hiatus, the longest in the history of the rivalry, Texas A&M and Texas met for the first time since 2011 last season. That matchup arrived with Texas eyeing a spot in the SEC Championship Game. This year, the roles will be reversed, with the Aggies looking to finish off an undefeated regular season and their first win over the Longhorns since 2010.
Though they’d never admit it, or even let themselves think it, the reality is that winning that game may not be in the best interest of Mike Elko and his team.
Despite needing to pull off the largest comeback in program history to down a three-win South Carolina team at Kyle Field in Week 12, Texas A&M held firm at No. 3 in Tuesday night’s College Football Playoff Rankings reveal. The movement, though, came behind the Aggies.
Georgia moved up to No. 4 as Alabama, which lost to Oklahoma, fell to No. 10, the final at-large team in the field. The Bulldogs appear to be surging, beating Texas 35-10 between the hedges on Saturday night, and if Texas A&M loses to Texas in the final week of the regular season, the Dawgs will have a chance to avenge their loss to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game, which has tiebreakers over both Georgia and A&M.
Texas A&M’s best-case scenario may include a Texas loss
Before we lay out Texas A&M’s best-case scenario for the College Football Playoff, let’s lay out the worst: A&M wins a hard-fought game over Texas, then has to turn around and play Alabama the next week, and loses in the SEC Championship Game.
The Big Ten will almost certainly get two of the four byes through the first round of the CFP, with Ohio State and Indiana still No. 1 and 2 in the latest rankings and on a clear collision course. It’s unlikely that the SEC gets the other two, especially with Texas Tech sitting at No. 5. The loser of the SEC Championship Game, in this case A&M, could then slide to the No. 5 seed with Georgia, oddly enough, after missing the SEC Championship Game, taking the final bye.
How far the committee dropped Alabama on Tuesday night probably did A&M a favor in this scenario, because it’s unlikely that two-loss Alabama would catapult from No. 10 (or thereabouts) to No. 4 after championship weekend. Still, that’s another possible way that A&M could find itself in a worst-case scenario.
If A&M loses the SEC Championship Game and somehow ends up with the No. 5 or No. 6 seed, then it will have to play the maximum number of possible games while teams that missed the conference championship got a rest, and others that earned a first-round bye did too.
Elko’s rebuttal, of course, would be that if his team wins the SEC Championship Game and enters the playoff at 13-0, it would be the No. 2 seed behind the Big Ten Champion and get its rest. Still, the risk of falling out of the top 4 may not be worth the reward because I’d argue that that still isn’t the Aggies’ best-case scenario.
Should the Aggies even want to go to the SEC Championship Game?
What could possibly be better than the program’s first-ever SEC Championship and a guaranteed trip to the CFP quarterfinals, you asked? Well, I admit that it wouldn’t come with that elusive conference title, but as far as Texas A&M’s national championship chances are concerned, it’s still better to lose to Texas.
If Texas A&M loses to Texas, it would likely slide to No. 5. In that situation, the Aggies would still have a week off (conference championship Saturday), but instead of playing Alabama in its 13th game, would get the fifth-highest-ranked conference champion. That’s a game when Elko would almost certainly be able to rest his starters for much of the second half, drastically decreasing the team’s injury risk relative to a 13th game against the Crimson Tide. The same applies if the Aggies fall to No. 6 and play the fourth-highest-ranked conference champion, almost certainly from the ACC.
It’s a difficult needle to thread, and there is the factor that any injuries that A&M would suffer in the first round of the CFP, they’d have less time to recover from before the quarterfinals than any injuries suffered in the SEC Championship Game. However, I’d prefer the decreased injury risk over the extra time to recover.
That’s before mentioning that last year, all four teams that received a first-round bye lost their quarterfinal matchup. Some of that is fluky in a small sample size with a different structure to seeding that gifted Boise State the No. 4 seed. Still, it’s notable when considering the easiest path to the national championship.
When the ball is kicked in Austin on Black Friday, all Aggie fans are going to want to beat Texas, and they should. I guess I’m just saying that it’s not the end of the world if they don’t.