3 Things To Carry Into 2024 from Texas A&M Football's Texas Bowl Loss to OSU

Takeaways For 2024 Texas A&M Football from Texas Bowl Loss

For any team, including Texas A&M football, it can be tough to judge how much relevance a bowl performance has. That opaque nature can grow even more so when the team is operating with only about half their scholarship players in the bowl game and forced to play walk-ons at important positions.

You can tell that this was not even an optimal scheme for the guys to be playing in: due to the lack of depth up front, the Aggies were operating with as few defensive linemen as possible. Malick Sylla was playing outside linebacker (and not in the way that Durkin sometimes had him and Diggs do—this was a legitimate OLB position that he was having to play).

Even so, there were lots of positives. Somehow, even though the Aggies were having issues scoring, this was about as dynamic as the offense had looked all year, especially through the air. Marcel Reed didn't exactly look like a veteran out there, but he acquitted himself far better than many would have anticipated, had you said beforehand that he would be taking the majority of the snaps.

Most of the negatives, in all honesty, can be explained by the dearth of available players. The pass defense was horrendous (though, was it really worse than it was in the Miami game?), but the Aggies were starting walk-on Kent Robinson at one of the corner spots. The run defense excelled even with the absolutely decimated front seven the Aggies were working with.

So what can we take with us as we turn the page to the Elko era? Let's take a look and find out.