Texas A&M Football
Another story I’m looking at is Auburn. Gus Malzahn brought Jeremy Johnson along last year. Gus Malzahn is a pretty hype-averse dude. The fact that he brought the quarterback is a license for everybody else to think that Johnson must be good. Jeremy Johnson, when he had played as a freshman and sophomore, had looked fantastic. Look at our predictions for the winners of the SEC West and East and the winner of the SEC every year. We are idiots. So, I don’t think there are any overarching storylines unless some news drops between now and Thursday.
It is interesting because you have Tennessee with all of these expectations. This is as excited as anyone has been about football in Knoxville in a long, long time. That roster is awesome. They can definitely compete with anyone in the league and for an SEC Championship. You saw last year they lost some close games and they have to learn how to finish. If they can do that, they are going to fulfill that promise. If they don’t, people are going to be really mad at Butch Jones. If you have listened to Jones, everything he has said at the beginning of the season, he has been dead on. I do want to see what he says at SEC Media Days. I remember last year everyone was saying that Tennessee was going to win the SEC East. I just wasn’t convinced and thought that they weren’t quite there yet. Jones was right. When we say they weren’t quite there, we mean the distance between maybe six inches. That is how much they missed the field goal by at Florida. That is how close they were. If they can get over that hump, and Florida seems to be a considerable hump for them since ’04, if they get past Florida they definitely have a shot and they seem best built out of the SEC East teams to compete with Alabama.
The thing about Tennessee is that Florida is laying in the weeds a little bit. I think Florida is sandbagging a little bit in Gainesville. I don’t necessarily believe in the quarterback, I just don’t think the defense is going to have the drop off that people expect based on the personnel that they lost. They can reload on defense, they have the talent there and it wont be an issue. If they are a little bit better on the offensive line and they have a functional quarterback, they could be good. We don’t know if Antonio Callaway is going to play. We don’t know if Tyrie Cleveland, the freshman from Houston, is as good as his recruiting hype suggested. If he is then that is an interesting story. We will see about Callaway, they have been very mysterious about that process and it has been a secretive, official affairs deal. They will make the decision when they make it. It may mean that he doesn’t play at all this season, half the season or he could play the whole season. Nobody knows right now.”
“I think you can say that this is a down year for quarterbacks and a real up year for defensive lineman. That equals some really ugly quarterback play. Also, if you look around the league, there aren’t that many dominant offensive lines. There are a few really good individual offensive lineman but not a ton great groups coming back that we know of and that is going to be a problem for those quarterbacks. If you can’t move around like Chad Kelly and Josh Dobbs do, they are going to be teeing off on you. Think about all of the good defensive lineman in the league. Texas A&M fans already know with Myles Garrett and Daeshon Hall. Then you have Derek Barnett at Tennessee, Carl Lawson at Auburn and Tim Williams at Alabama. The list goes on. Every time Williams was on the field he got to the quarterback and he didn’t even play that much. Jonathan Allen is great at rushing the quarterback too. The whole Missouri defense is going to be fantastic. Their offense not so much. That kind of describes a lot of the league. This is the first time that I can remember that we are talking about A&M’s defense in a while, more than we are talking about their offense.”
“A&M’s defense is going to be able to stop people and that will keep them in games. The offense is still going to have to produce and we don’t know what this offense is going to do. We haven’t seen Noel Mazzone in the SEC since he left Auburn. We haven’t seen Trevor Knight in the SEC since he played Alabama and he played pretty well against them. Him as the starter the following year was a different story. It is going to be hard to figure out how that is going to go at A&M because there are so many unknowns on offense. Playmaker-wise I think they are in good shape with Christian Kirk. Ricky Seals-Jones is almost there. Outsiders see him and think that because he is tall that he is just like Mike Evans. He is not. He is a totally different player, but he is still a very good weapon in the passing game. Seals-Jones is not going to take the top off of the defense, but that is what Christian Kirk is there to do. Texas A&M has Ricky Seals-Jones and Josh Reynolds. You can post dudes up in single coverage. I don’t care if they get tackled right when they catch the ball, they are still nine yards down the field.“
“Noel Mazzone has been everywhere and seen everything. What’s interesting is the way that it shakes out two games in the first weeks. In the first game you have Mazzone going against the defense that knows him very well because they used to go against him everyday at practice for years at UCLA. Then you have Dave Aranda with LSU’s defense going against Wisconsin’s offense, who went up against him for years. I think it is advantage whoever has the best players. As much as we try to break it down, it is still advantage to the team that has the best players.”
“I think 7.5 over-under on the win-loss for A&M season is spot on. I’m not sure if I can pick a side. I think an 8, A&M’s schedule is hard. You look at the three SEC West programs where there is chatter about the coach’s job, and A&M has the hardest schedule of the three. Not just the fact that they play UCLA first because Auburn plays Clemson first. The way the games fall for A&M gives them a tough stretch at the beginning. If they can get through that they will be fine. They will know by October what they are, positively or Negatively. If they get through the first month and a half they will be fine. You still get beat up playing games you should win. If you hit a really rough patch in late-October and early-November in heartbreaking fashion or you get creamed, that becomes a mental thing the rest of the way. Plus it becomes a physical thing, too.
The problem with having a tough schedule early is that if you lose a couple of those, you are in a deep hole and you have to really rally to get your team back on track. Arkansas and Tennessee did it last year. That is hard to do. Sumlin hasn’t had to do it. You look back to Houston and they never hat to do it there because they were always good. We will see how it goes. I think this staff can do that. It is not outside of their capability. The problem that is universal for the coaches in the SEC West, who are all making over $4 million a year, they can’t all win every game. Somebody has to lose. Whether that is A&M, Auburn, LSU, Ole Miss or Mississippi State. There will be two or three fan bases that are going to be really mad at the end of this season even though all of the staffs are pretty good and the players are pretty good also. Even if you put them in the SEC East you would be looking at them completely differently but that is just the way that things are.”
“My SEC West pick is Alabama. In the East I have been saying Georgia. I like the running game. I like the fact that they get Tennessee right after they play Florida. I think that is a pretty opportune spot for them. Their traditional SEC West opponent is Auburn. Those two have a typically harder road it seems like. Georgia was pretty mediocre last year and they still won 10 games. Kirby Smart is going to make them better and I feel like Georgia was the sleeping giant. If the right coach is there, and we don’t know if Kirby Smart is the right coach, we will find out very quickly. If you put the right coach there they could make an Alabama type of run once Nick Saban retires.”
“That is the thing. Tennessee having Alabama on the schedule, you mark that down and that is tradition. You play Alabama on the third Saturday in October. Florida doesn’t have to play Alabama and Georgia doesn’t either. Tennessee has to beat Florida. YouTube was in its infancy the last time Tennessee beat Florida. The iPhone didn’t exist and Twitter didn’t exist for three more years. Facebook had just been invented. It was still called ‘The Facebook’. They hadn’t gotten rid of the ‘The’ yet. Mark Zuckerberg might have still been in school.”
SI's Andy Staples previews Media Days, SEC in 2016
Key quotes from Andy Staples interview
“There is not really anything major that I am following this week. People are going to ask Hugh Freeze about Ole Miss’ situation and stuff that he is not going to talk about. We don’t know what the NCAA has found since draft night when all of that stuff came out from whoever had Laremy Tunsil’s old phone. So, once we find that out, we might have a better idea of what is going to happen, but right now we don’t know what is going to happen. You can ask Hugh Freeze about it but he isn’t going to tell you. He won’t talk about it much. He will say, ‘This is what we said. We said what we said. We can’t say anymore.' Now he could, but they aren’t going to.Another story I’m looking at is Auburn. Gus Malzahn brought Jeremy Johnson along last year. Gus Malzahn is a pretty hype-averse dude. The fact that he brought the quarterback is a license for everybody else to think that Johnson must be good. Jeremy Johnson, when he had played as a freshman and sophomore, had looked fantastic. Look at our predictions for the winners of the SEC West and East and the winner of the SEC every year. We are idiots. So, I don’t think there are any overarching storylines unless some news drops between now and Thursday.
It is interesting because you have Tennessee with all of these expectations. This is as excited as anyone has been about football in Knoxville in a long, long time. That roster is awesome. They can definitely compete with anyone in the league and for an SEC Championship. You saw last year they lost some close games and they have to learn how to finish. If they can do that, they are going to fulfill that promise. If they don’t, people are going to be really mad at Butch Jones. If you have listened to Jones, everything he has said at the beginning of the season, he has been dead on. I do want to see what he says at SEC Media Days. I remember last year everyone was saying that Tennessee was going to win the SEC East. I just wasn’t convinced and thought that they weren’t quite there yet. Jones was right. When we say they weren’t quite there, we mean the distance between maybe six inches. That is how much they missed the field goal by at Florida. That is how close they were. If they can get over that hump, and Florida seems to be a considerable hump for them since ’04, if they get past Florida they definitely have a shot and they seem best built out of the SEC East teams to compete with Alabama.
The thing about Tennessee is that Florida is laying in the weeds a little bit. I think Florida is sandbagging a little bit in Gainesville. I don’t necessarily believe in the quarterback, I just don’t think the defense is going to have the drop off that people expect based on the personnel that they lost. They can reload on defense, they have the talent there and it wont be an issue. If they are a little bit better on the offensive line and they have a functional quarterback, they could be good. We don’t know if Antonio Callaway is going to play. We don’t know if Tyrie Cleveland, the freshman from Houston, is as good as his recruiting hype suggested. If he is then that is an interesting story. We will see about Callaway, they have been very mysterious about that process and it has been a secretive, official affairs deal. They will make the decision when they make it. It may mean that he doesn’t play at all this season, half the season or he could play the whole season. Nobody knows right now.”
“I think you can say that this is a down year for quarterbacks and a real up year for defensive lineman. That equals some really ugly quarterback play. Also, if you look around the league, there aren’t that many dominant offensive lines. There are a few really good individual offensive lineman but not a ton great groups coming back that we know of and that is going to be a problem for those quarterbacks. If you can’t move around like Chad Kelly and Josh Dobbs do, they are going to be teeing off on you. Think about all of the good defensive lineman in the league. Texas A&M fans already know with Myles Garrett and Daeshon Hall. Then you have Derek Barnett at Tennessee, Carl Lawson at Auburn and Tim Williams at Alabama. The list goes on. Every time Williams was on the field he got to the quarterback and he didn’t even play that much. Jonathan Allen is great at rushing the quarterback too. The whole Missouri defense is going to be fantastic. Their offense not so much. That kind of describes a lot of the league. This is the first time that I can remember that we are talking about A&M’s defense in a while, more than we are talking about their offense.”
“A&M’s defense is going to be able to stop people and that will keep them in games. The offense is still going to have to produce and we don’t know what this offense is going to do. We haven’t seen Noel Mazzone in the SEC since he left Auburn. We haven’t seen Trevor Knight in the SEC since he played Alabama and he played pretty well against them. Him as the starter the following year was a different story. It is going to be hard to figure out how that is going to go at A&M because there are so many unknowns on offense. Playmaker-wise I think they are in good shape with Christian Kirk. Ricky Seals-Jones is almost there. Outsiders see him and think that because he is tall that he is just like Mike Evans. He is not. He is a totally different player, but he is still a very good weapon in the passing game. Seals-Jones is not going to take the top off of the defense, but that is what Christian Kirk is there to do. Texas A&M has Ricky Seals-Jones and Josh Reynolds. You can post dudes up in single coverage. I don’t care if they get tackled right when they catch the ball, they are still nine yards down the field.“
“Noel Mazzone has been everywhere and seen everything. What’s interesting is the way that it shakes out two games in the first weeks. In the first game you have Mazzone going against the defense that knows him very well because they used to go against him everyday at practice for years at UCLA. Then you have Dave Aranda with LSU’s defense going against Wisconsin’s offense, who went up against him for years. I think it is advantage whoever has the best players. As much as we try to break it down, it is still advantage to the team that has the best players.”
“I think 7.5 over-under on the win-loss for A&M season is spot on. I’m not sure if I can pick a side. I think an 8, A&M’s schedule is hard. You look at the three SEC West programs where there is chatter about the coach’s job, and A&M has the hardest schedule of the three. Not just the fact that they play UCLA first because Auburn plays Clemson first. The way the games fall for A&M gives them a tough stretch at the beginning. If they can get through that they will be fine. They will know by October what they are, positively or Negatively. If they get through the first month and a half they will be fine. You still get beat up playing games you should win. If you hit a really rough patch in late-October and early-November in heartbreaking fashion or you get creamed, that becomes a mental thing the rest of the way. Plus it becomes a physical thing, too.
The problem with having a tough schedule early is that if you lose a couple of those, you are in a deep hole and you have to really rally to get your team back on track. Arkansas and Tennessee did it last year. That is hard to do. Sumlin hasn’t had to do it. You look back to Houston and they never hat to do it there because they were always good. We will see how it goes. I think this staff can do that. It is not outside of their capability. The problem that is universal for the coaches in the SEC West, who are all making over $4 million a year, they can’t all win every game. Somebody has to lose. Whether that is A&M, Auburn, LSU, Ole Miss or Mississippi State. There will be two or three fan bases that are going to be really mad at the end of this season even though all of the staffs are pretty good and the players are pretty good also. Even if you put them in the SEC East you would be looking at them completely differently but that is just the way that things are.”
“My SEC West pick is Alabama. In the East I have been saying Georgia. I like the running game. I like the fact that they get Tennessee right after they play Florida. I think that is a pretty opportune spot for them. Their traditional SEC West opponent is Auburn. Those two have a typically harder road it seems like. Georgia was pretty mediocre last year and they still won 10 games. Kirby Smart is going to make them better and I feel like Georgia was the sleeping giant. If the right coach is there, and we don’t know if Kirby Smart is the right coach, we will find out very quickly. If you put the right coach there they could make an Alabama type of run once Nick Saban retires.”
“That is the thing. Tennessee having Alabama on the schedule, you mark that down and that is tradition. You play Alabama on the third Saturday in October. Florida doesn’t have to play Alabama and Georgia doesn’t either. Tennessee has to beat Florida. YouTube was in its infancy the last time Tennessee beat Florida. The iPhone didn’t exist and Twitter didn’t exist for three more years. Facebook had just been invented. It was still called ‘The Facebook’. They hadn’t gotten rid of the ‘The’ yet. Mark Zuckerberg might have still been in school.”
Never miss the latest news from TexAgs!
Join our free email list
