Texas A&M will face their first power opponent this Saturday when Arizona State rolls into town, coming off of an emphatic 70-7 win against FCS Morgan State. Mike Elko and the Aggies had a nice tune-up against Missouri State, but this weekend’s game will be a whole different beast entirely— though Arizona State is far from the toughest opponent on Texas A&M’s schedule, they definitely pose some particular challenges to the Aggies that will be telling for A&M fans going forward.
Cutter Boley, the Kentucky transfer, is the starting quarterback for the Sun Devils, and though he didn’t do much of note statistically in Lexington, he lit it up in his first game in Tempe. A lot of that has to do with the receivers that are surrounding him, though— Kenny Dillingham did some work in the transfer portal to bring in two top-level talents at the receiver position in Omarion Miller and Reed Harris.
While Boley may be in for a statistical renaissance compared to his previous season, the story for the Aggies really should start and end with the receivers that the Sun Devils are working with. Miller and Harris are going to be the focal point of this offense in Tempe, and Dillingham is going to do whatever he can to get the ball in their hands— and he can get pretty creative to do it.
Mike Elko and Texas A&M have one simple job against the Arizona State Sun Devils
Most of the yardage that the Sun Devils piled up this past Saturday came as a result of the receivers picking up yards after the catch— in other words, the ball was out pretty quick, and often pretty short. Dillingham can scheme things up pretty effectively to get his guys into space, not all that different from what we’ve seen out of Lane Kiffin offenses, so the Aggies will need to be aggressive to keep Arizona State off balance.
The name of the game with Dillingham is RPOs. That means that the Aggies need to be able to control the line of scrimmage with their defensive line and make it hard for Boley to make the right read; if the Ags are able to prevent ASU from getting any push up front without dedicating too many men to the line of scrimmage, Boley will have to take the pass reads.
This is where the main matchup of the game comes in: the Aggie corners against the Arizona State receivers. If Ricks, Humphrey, and Gibson can man these guys up and lock them down without needing a lot of help, then fans can expect to see the ASU offense hit a rut in a major way. It won’t quite look like what we saw against Missouri State, of course, but it will be similarly effective in just how stifling it will feel for the opposing team.
This is a true test for Mike Elko’s specialty in that secondary— a unit that was really so excellent last year in so many ways and looked the part again in game one. If they’re able to pull this off, it will go a long way towards building confidence in the defense’s abilities going forward into the rest of the season.
The defense for the Sun Devils is nothing to write home about, based on one game of evidence against a horrible FCS team, but there were some early kinks to work out for the Aggies last game that fans will be monitoring closely. The Aggies need to come out and operate pretty cleanly here in the opening quarter— if they are able to do that and the defense can hold up, we’ll be looking at an emphatic lead very early on.
So that’s the plan A&M needs to carry in: stop the RPO, win the game. Even if Marcel is off on Saturday, the run game for the Aggies should be more than enough to keep them on schedule against a defense like this— they’re far more physical. I think we see an emphatic win in this one— give me Texas A&M pulling way away in the second half and going home victorious, 38-13.
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