Texas A&M has opened as a 13.5-point favorite over the Arkansas Razorbacks for this upcoming weekend's game in Kyle Field according to FanDuel— a line that, after the way this Aggie team has played over the last two weeks, is honestly pretty baffling. Mike Elko's team has looked extremely out of sync over the course of the past two games, and, despite their talent, they have put out a subpar product on the field to say the least.
Of course, it is also true that Arkansas is the exact team the Aggies would want to play for a get-right game thanks to just how hapless the Hogs are. They have occupied the bottom of the barrel in the SEC Power Rankings every single week thus far, and seem scheduled to continue in that spot going forward.
Ryan Silverfield has been a complete bust of a hire through the beginning of his tenure (though, admittedly, he was handed quite a difficult task with where the Arkansas program currently is). However, if he is going to get a win to give Hog fans hope, you have to think that he has this one circled in a big way.
Texas A&M somehow opens as two-touchdown favorite over Arkansas
That's for the simple fact that the Aggies looked for the better part of last week like they were a team that could hardly expect to score 14 points at all, much less outscore another SEC team by that many. LSU terrorized Marcel Reed on every single dropback— even when they were nowhere close to him and the protection was holding up, it was about a 50/50 chance that he'd just escape the pocket and get to running.
There are some flashes of hope here: the Aggies actually did a pretty good job of running the ball when they were committing to that aspect of their game. Arkansas's defensive front has not been great at stopping the run, so if A&M shifts to a ground-and-pound type of offense, then they could get out of this one pretty comfortably.
However, the Hogs also bring in the SEC's leading receiver by yardage in Chris Marshall, a former A&M signee from the class of 2022 that will be looking to make a statement against his old team. KJ Jackson is not exactly proficient at pushing the ball down the field with regularity, but this much-heralded Aggie secondary has yet to stop a P4 team through the air in the second half of any game this season.
This raises the question overall of whether this line is indicative of where Vegas actually thinks A&M is as a program (and, for that matter, Arkansas), or whether there is still some holdover in their power rating system from preseason priors— in other words, they haven't quite fully backed off from the assumption they had coming into the season that A&M was a pretty good team.
For comparison, Georgia opened at about a 17.5-point favorite on the road at Arkansas when they played a couple of weeks ago. You have the home/road variable flipped there, but that still seems like it's way too close to the Aggies' current line for how A&M has been performing versus how Georgia has been.
Maybe Vegas knows something we don't, though— more often than we'd like, that tends to be the case. Maybe this is a get-right game for the Aggies and the machinery of this offense finally cranks to life. Maybe the defense gets a confidence boost against Silverfield and company. Or, maybe Elko suffers his worst loss yet as a head coach— and things start to get really scary.
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