If you asked anyone before the season if they would take a number 7 ranking and the way we feel about the team right now, the answer would be an easy yes. Halfway through the year, we’re 4-1 with a top 5 win under our belt. Looking ahead at our schedule, Auburn is the only ranked team left, and they’ve looked pretty shaky outside of their most recent win against LSU. I wish we could say with certainty that we should run through the rest of our schedule and have a shot at the playoff, but we still play in the SEC, and there are plenty of trap games left on the schedule.
That all starts this week at South Carolina against another team that’s looking for their first win against A&M since we joined the conference. It will be a weird environment since normally Williams-Brice is packed and the fans are going crazy, but things will be a little different this year. The players will have to lean on each other and the momentum from the first half of the season to help secure a big win and another step toward moving up in the polls.
Lia Musgrave, TexAgs
Mond and Fisher need to pile on the points in weeks to come.
Last week, I think I had four keys for us coming out of our bye week to focus on for the Arkansas game. Moving forward to the second half of the season, there’s only one: dominance. I’m going to take a step back from this individual game and look at the rest of the season as a whole. Is it a realistic goal for us to make the College Football Playoff? It most certainly is. So what is our biggest obstacle in getting there at the moment?
This weekend, the Pac-12 returns, but honestly, nobody in that conference really worries me. They are playing fewer games, so there’s a chance somebody goes undefeated, but if not, I think they’re out. The Big 12 is, well...the Big 12. Cincinnati is destined to lose at some point, Notre Dame could lose to Clemson this weekend and Georgia will either lose to Florida this weekend or Bama again. That alone puts us at number 4 with plenty of other things to still play out. Going back to my question of our biggest obstacle though, it’s going to end up being style points.
Our next three games are against South Carolina, Ole Miss and Tennessee. As well as we played against Arkansas, we still only won the game by 11 points. We dominated the Mississippi State game but only won by 14. The way I see it, we’re in purgatory between Alabama and the rest of the SEC along with Florida and Georgia right now. These next couple of weeks will play a big role in us showing either that we belong in the conversation to be in the playoff or that we aren’t ready for that kind of talk. It’s going to be huge that we assert our dominance and show that we can control a game from the very first snap until the very last.
This is the most confident I think we as Aggies have been able to feel in a long time, but there are still steps that can be taken forward. I’d like to see our defense hold a pretty solid offense under two scores and for the offense to continue its upwards trend and not take any steps back. We’re currently one of the worst teams in the country when it comes to penalties per game, so we have to avoid any chance of allowing the South Carolina faithful to feel like they need to stick around for this one. This team has five steps to go in becoming a historic team for this university, but all they need to worry about right now is step number one.
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