The hidden reason Texas A&M football fans should have ultimate confidence against LSU

Why Texas A&M football fans have a huge historical trend on their side against LSU

Texas A&M football is hosting LSU this weekend in the most consequential game yet this year for the SEC standings. Both teams are currently undefeated in conference and therefore sit atop the standings—whoever wins this weekend, then, will be in pole position going forward.

Accordingly, this game is getting top billing. A clash of two of the hottest teams in the country, both on six-game win streaks, for control of the nation's premier conference? It doesn't get much better than that.

As you might expect, then, Aggie fans are anxious about how their team will play in this one. There's all sorts of storylines to follow in this one and intriguing matchups aplenty.

We already have broken some of those down this week, and will continue to do so. But there's something interesting to note here.

LSU is coming to Kyle Field on the second half of a back to back road slate, as I noted in my initial preview. Back to back games in conference play are treacherous in the SEC, as you might surmise—but I decided to do a little digging to see just how treacherous they really are.

Before I continue, a quick disclaimer: I am not counting any two-game stretch that was separated by an off week, and with apologies to Nashville, I am also not counting any two-game stretch that includes a visit to Vanderbilt. The environment there is simply not close to any other in the conference.

Here's what I found.

Texas A&M football has decided advantage thanks to historical trend

Over the last ten years, there have been 78 occurrences of an SEC team having back-to-back road conference games with no bye week. Of those, only 8 teams won both games.

But there's more.

In the last five years, there have been 38 such occurrences, and there have been only 3 times where a team won both games. Those teams were 2019 LSU (who beat Alabama and Ole Miss), 2022 Georgia (who beat Mississippi State and Kentucky), and 2023 Alabama (who beat Mississippi State and A&M): two historically great teams and a Nick Saban Alabama team that made the playoff and finished no. 4 in the final poll.

It's worth noting, too, that all three of these back-to-back wins involved these teams struggling way too much with an opponent that turned out to be far worse than them. 2023 Alabama squeaked out a 6-point win over 7-6 A&M; 2022 Georgia only put up 16 points against 7-6 Kentucky; 2019 LSU got involved in an unforeseen shootout against 4-8 Ole Miss, where the Rebels put up a season-high 37 points.

In three of the years I examined—2021, 2020, and 2017, no teams won back to back road conference games. There were 23 opportunities, and not one was converted (interestingly, this includes Alabama losing at A&M on the front end of a back-to-back in 2021).

Here's the upshot: teams pretty much never have their fastball in these situations, and so I think we can expect LSU to significantly struggle in Kyle Field this Saturday. That does not guarantee a win, of course, but given that LSU beat Arkansas last week, I think we can say that it is pretty unlikely.

There are a lot of ways in which this is a good matchup for the Aggies even if we were expecting LSU to be on their A-game. But given these data, I think that A-game might elude the Bayou Bengals—which is great news for the Aggies.