Statistics show that Texas A&M football has no reason to fear the Longhorns' offense

Statistics demonstrate that Texas A&M football will be seeing nothing special on offense this weekend

Texas A&M football is headed for a rivalry matchup with the Texas Longhorns this weekend. The head man down in Austin, Steve Sarkisian, comes into this game with a solid reputation as an offensive mind, and thus the Longhorns themselves carry a reputation of being a team that's pretty squared away on that side of the ball.

However, there's obviously a lot that has been made of the weak schedule Texas has played so far this year. The best defense they've played all year was Georgia; and that game was an abject disaster for the Longhorn offense.

So, it's worth asking the question: is the Texas offense really all that good?

Bill Radjewski, the arbiter of collegefootballdata.com, a great resource for advanced college football statistics, put together an opponent-adjusted chart of offensive Expected Points Added per play (you can think of EPA as yards per play, but adding context for down, distance, and field position). This chart is rather illustrative as to the answer to the above question.

A tip for reading these charts is that you can form "tiers" by drawing diagonal lines that go from the top left to the bottom right. Doing so reveals that the Longhorn's offense is roughly on the same level as the Aggies', a little worse than Baylor, and Washington State, and a little better than North Texas.

What's more, this also reveals that the Aggies are the best team the Longhorns will have faced since they played Georgia. A&M is better running the ball and not quite as good passing (though there are a couple of poor performances from Conner Weigman baked into that data, it should be said).

However, the Aggies have already faced a much better offense than the Longhorns in the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Texas is better at passing, but the Irish are one of the best rushing offenses in the nation.

The numbers don't exactly paint a picture of some dominant offensive unit rolling in to face off with the Aggies. Rather, this is a middling attack that will be coming up against one of the best defenses in the conference—and the best environment in the nation.