Texas A&M fans should know well at this point that there's a good reason they refer to the offseason as "silly season"— and even by those standards, we've reached a low point.
You'd think such a nadir would occur much closer to the midpoint of the time without college football, when the wait is longest until there's actual games being played. However, for Aggie fans, the peak of silly season has apparently come here with less than ten days to go before toe meets leather for Texas A&M against the UTSA Roadrunners.
What is this peak of silly season, you ask? Simple enough: the pattern that has so recently developed of hot take artists looking to fire off opinions who have apparently decided that the Aggies' chances against those aforementioned Roadrunners are what should be next in their sights. We've already covered one guy mentioning it on X, which A&M fans roundly scorned, but now it's spread to other places. It's time it get stomped out.
No, Texas A&M's game against UTSA is not "primed" for App State repeat, and here's why
Tom Williams, writing for Mike Farrell Sports, opines that the Aggies are "primed" for being upset against the UTSA Roadrunners. This is very obviously silly, but let's break down exactly why that's the case for the uninitiated.
First of all, painful as it may be for the Aggie fans reading here, we need to go over just why the Aggies failed to get a win against the Mountaineers in 2022. There are several reasons, some in-game and some off-the field, but a quick survey should do.
The most obvious change is that the coaching staff has entirely turned over since that point, as has the culture. Things had gone downhill in the locker room under Jimbo, as has been well-covered, and that's no longer the case under Mike Elko— the program has turned over a new leaf.
What is less well-analyzed is the anatomy of that exact upset. App State held the ball for 40 minutes of game time, picking up roughly 3.5 yards per carry on a shocking 52 attempts. That is an extreme outlier for success running the ball!
The other extreme outlier is that the Mountaineers ran 82 plays to the Aggies' 38. Part of that had to do with the fact that Devon Achane returned a kickoff for a touchdown in the game, giving the ball right back to App, but that's still a really surprising disparity.
Then, you have the turnovers. The Aggies were subject to a nearly 25% havoc rate up front by the App State defense, thanks to an extremely green and poorly-coached offensive line, and accordingly turned the ball over twice— not to mention they had at least one that they should have procured for themselves get overturned thanks to a penalty.
In other words, it was the perfect storm— one that heralded the then-still-long-off end of the Fisher era. But are the ingredients there for such an upset again?
Well, UTSA has a very senior offense, but other than that, this game bears very little resemblance. For one thing, Elko wasn't present in any capacity for the previous upset, which matters quite a bit here, to my mind.
The two biggest factors here were the Aggies' inability to hold onto the ball for any extended stretch and their inability to stop App State's drives. With an extremely experienced offensive line— two of which were playing in their second year in that very App State game, if that gives you any perspective for how long they've been in the program— that seems like far less of a pressing issue.
There's some question about A&M's ability to stop the run with the turnover along the defensive interior and some less-than-ideal safety play in the rush game last year, but under Elko— as this defense now is as of this year— the Aggies were always very gap-sound in their assignments.
So could UTSA go over the Aggies' heads over and over during this game? There's little you can do to stop a perfectly-placed ball, but I don't think the Roadrunners have the athletes to run the 2019 LSU offense against A&M all evening.
In short, there's no real parallel between these two games. The Aggie program is in a far different place than they were beforehand, and this UTSA team, while experienced offensively, does not stand a chance to beat them in the way that App State d