The Texas A&M Aggies open the 2016 season at 3:30 p.m. ET on Saturday, Sept. 3, when they host UCLA at Kyle Field. The game kicks off the CBS fall football schedule as well.

The Aggies opened last season by throttling Pac-12 brethren Arizona State, 38-17, in Houston and look to make the Bruins their second consecutive conference victim. Texas A&M is currently a 2-point favorite to upend a Bruins team that the Pac-12 media picked to win the league’s South Division.

The Bruins could be ripe for the picking despite returning quarterback Josh Rosen, who had an outstanding freshman season in which he threw for 3,669 yards and 23 touchdowns with just 11 interceptions in 487 passing attempts.

But UCLA lost three of its top four receivers from last season, a couple of outstanding players defensively, and some depth along the offensive line.

The Bruins have a new offensive coordinator, promoting running backs coach Kennedy Polamalu, who has been an OC previously but never called plays before.

They were in need of a new OC because their previous one, Noel Mazzone, is now at Texas A&M after spending four seasons with the Bruins. That’s causing Bruins head coach Jim Mora to make adjustments.

“It changes some things, yeah,” Mora said at the recent Pac-12 media days. “You need to change some signals, some of your verbiage. But that’s natural for us right now because we have adapted our offense a little bit. I don’t know how much we’ll have to change defensively. Probably some of our hand signals. But structurally probably not anything.

“You know, as everyone always asks, is it an advantage to play someone that you’re so familiar with. It is and it isn’t because he’s familiar with you, as well. So it’s all about going out and executing and playing well and protecting the football and taking the football away and doing those things.”

Then, there’s the potential for distraction. Rosen’s dorm room hot tub removal, the social media comment on UCLA’s $280 million Under Armour deal, and the f-bomb he tweeted towards Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, not to mention the f-bomb baseball cap he wore to one of Trump’s golf courses.

“The hot tub I found amusing,” Mora said. “I thought it was a young college student having a little bit of fun. You know, the Donald Trump tweet and then the NCAA tweet, we had conversations about that and about the appearance, about the image that he’s projecting for himself and for his university.”

However, none of that is anywhere near the seriousness of the allegations concerning UCLA defensive coordinator Tom Bradley, who will be entering his second season with the Bruins. Bradley played at Penn State and then coached at the school from 1979 as a graduate assistant until 2011. He was the interim head coach when Joe Paterno was dismissed in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal.

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that Bradley refuted testimony included in court documents contending that he knew about alleged incidents of sexual abuse involving Sandusky prior to their being reported to university administrators.

The report said that according to a statement released by Bradley’s attorney, Brett Senior, Bradley never witnessed improper behavior involving Sandusky or knew about alleged incidents of sexual abuse that occurred in the 1980s or ’90s. Sandusky was convicted in 2012 of assaulting 10 boys over a 15-year period and was sentenced to at least 30 years in prison.

It went on to say that Penn State graduate assistant Mike McQueary asserted in the court record that he told Bradley about what he had seen, and that not only did Bradley not act surprised but went on to tell McQueary about an incident in which then-Penn State assistant coach Greg Schiano had witnessed Sandusky molesting a child in the 1990s.

All that, coupled with the fact that the Bruins lost three of their last four games in 2015, could be why they’ve been installed as an underdog for the 2016 season opener.

“Well, we lost some momentum late during the season,” Mora said. “As coaches, it’s always our job to put our players in the best position to have success, and we certainly didn’t do a good enough job of that. And then we realized that we need to continue to emphasize just getting bigger and stronger and more physical, and that’s something that every coach will tell you they emphasize all of the time.

“But it’s no fun when a team can run the ball on you, especially the way Nebraska did, and that was a function of us not doing a very good job as coaches and us, quite frankly, just needing to continue to develop our players naturally, and that’s what we’ve emphasized.”

The Aggies look to pile on to UCLA’s miseries on the first Saturday in September.