Taking a look at the numbers: What are realistic expectations for Texas A&M football?

Examining the numbers to find realistic expectations for Texas A&M football in 2024: How high can the Aggies fly?

There are a lot of prognostications going at the moment for exactly how this Texas A&M football team will do this year. I myself threw down the gauntlet yesterday, adding my own predictions to the mix.

While everyone's predictions are based on numbers to an extent (even if the number is as simple as "they usually win around eight games"), taking a look at advanced statistical profiles can help be educational when it comes to setting expectations.

Kelley Ford of KFordRatings consistently puts out some of the most interesting applications of advanced stats to projecting how the season will go for a given team. He's currently going through and setting what his model believes to be realistic expectations for every team. Here's how he sees Texas A&M football this year (with an explanation to follow):

If you look at the win percentage column, just over from the team logos and week number, you'll see that the Aggies are favored or dead even in eleven of twelve games. Now, the margins are slim here for several key contests—namely, Florida, LSU, and Auburn—but in the preseason, Ford has the Aggies favored in 10 of 12 games, the Notre Dame game as a literal coin flip, and the Texas game as a toss-up (the yellow shading on the week number means his model sees this as a one-possession game with the Aggies as an underdog).

All that being said, how does this translate to win totals? To draw your attention over to the right hand side of the graphic, you'll see that the the model sees the Aggies as almost equally likely to reach 9 wins as 8 wins, and just a tad less likely to get to 10 wins than if they only notched 7.

This is part of why the Notre Dame game is so big for the Ags. Win that one, and you've set yourself up quite well. You can also see here why I'm actually pretty high on the Aggies' ability to get to 9 or 10 wins this year: these numbers are based on historical data from Jimbo's teams, with all the transfer portal comings and goings baked in.

That means that a better-coached Aggie team, producing better results, will exceed these expectations. This is not to mention the fact that the Jimbo teams that A&M is being judged off of underwent spectacularly bad injury luck over the past two years (three years at the quarterback position). A healthy year under a better coaching staff means this Texas A&M football team can fly as high as any in the country.