Looking back on Texas A&M's 2024 regular season with Jackie Sherrill

After a disappointing result on Saturday, former head coach Jackie Sherrill joined TexAgs Live to look back on the Aggies' 8-4 campaign. Sherrill discussed the Aggies and Longhorns' clash at Kyle Field, in-game analytics and much more.

Key notes from Jackie Sherrill inteview

• When you play games against rivals, sometimes the ball does not bounce your way. Unfortunately, you have to live with that for 365 days. My coffee did not taste as good as usual this morning.
   
• Players are what will make the difference between a good and great team. Players win. Coaches don't. The coach's job is to get players in the right position. That is one reason I like Mike Elko. They have done a great job.
   
• If you go back to last year and say we would only lose three conference games, you would take that in a heartbeat. It is going to take time. The players on the field are the ones who win the game.
   
• In my first two years here, we had a player that changed our mentality from thinking we could win to knowing we could win. That was Ray Childress.
   
• We had three or four guys on the front seven that could stop the run. You have to have seven guys. Look at all the great teams. They have two or three first-round draft choices within that group of seven. It is going to take time. You must work hard this offseason to bring in players for the front seven.
   
• You have to do what Marcel Reed can do well. You improve on those skills. You build your offense around him if he is your quarterback. You put players in positions that can help him in that scheme.
   
• On fourth and short, I always put the big guys in and three running backs in the backfield. That was back then. Today, there are all these spread offenses. Ole Miss puts in a 280-pound defensive tackle at running back. In the NFL, they are using the "QB push." You want to be able to outman the people you are going against. 
   
• You have to figure out a way to be successful on short-yardage downs. I won't second-guess because I am not with the players every day. We should go back years ago, when personal feelings were mixed with analytics to make decisions. Today, it is all analytics. Sometimes, you must throw that out the window, and as the game flows, you must be flexible. 
   
• Every game has different ebbs and flows. The same goes for your chart on whether to go for two. I have lost some games by going strictly by the chart. We would have won if I had kicked the extra point instead of going for two in a game or two. Sometimes, analytics doesn't trump your feel and flow of the game. 
   
• Ray Childress was a great player. We had a good team, but we were up and down. We went to Arkansas and got embarrassed. We came back to play TCU. In a Thursday meeting, he jumped up and said, "I am not letting TCU beat me." We put a knot on TCU, and he was a one-man wrecking crew. That allowed our players to understand that they knew how to win instead of just thinking they could. It taught them how to win. We went to Texas the next week and beat them 37-12.