I have no idea what Texas A&M just did other than clinch a Playoff berth
Published:
Instead of referring to a stark contrast of personalities as “Jekyll and Hyde,” let’s instead switch to whatever we witnessed on Saturday at Kyle Field.
Was South Carolina-Texas A&M a tale of 2 halves? Nah. That’s like saying it gets cloudy during a hurricane.
Texas A&M played seemingly the worst half of football that a top-3 team has ever played at home against a 3-win team in November, and then erased it with its largest comeback in school history en route to a 31-30 victory against South Carolina. Sure. Why not? Nothing made sense on Saturday, including whatever we witnessed with that A&M trick-play attempt on 3rd-and-1 in a 1-point game, wherein a true freshman running back threw a backwards pass and turned the ball over instead of putting the game away.
But A&M’s defense held strong on South Carolina’s last-ditch drive and held on for a Playoff-clinching win — A&M somehow improved to 10-0 with FCS Samford on deck — that’ll be talked about for a long time in College Station.
“Where were you when the Aggies clinched their first Playoff berth in school history with the most baffling game in human history?”
Here’s hoping you weren’t in the way of the state trooper who decided he had the right to walk through not 1, but 2 South Carolina players.
To be fair, that state trooper showed more fight than anybody on A&M’s sideline in the first half.
(Also to be fair, A&M Police shared that the trooper had been relieved of his gameday duties … rightfully so.)
That’s hardly saying much. After all, A&M did seemingly every bad thing one can do in a half of football. It sailed passes, it dropped passes, it didn’t tackle, it shanked kicks, it didn’t win in the trenches, it got out-coached, etc. Shoot, it made matters even more awkward that it came on the heels of Mike Elko reportedly agreeing to new contract that’ll pay him more than $11 million per season, according to ESPN. Perhaps the only thing that A&M did right in the first half was not be found guilty of point shaving, though one could’ve doubted that after how atypical that performance felt from the 3-score favorite.
Never mind the fact that the 3-win Gamecocks were searching for their first win since September, or the fact that A&M hadn’t trailed by more than 10 points all season. Marcel Reed, AKA the guy who was 4th on the Heisman Trophy odds entering the day, looked like he shouldn’t have even been 4th on A&M’s depth chart during the first half. And sure, 4 first-half drops didn’t help, including a KC Concepcion drop in the end zone, and protection breakdowns led to Reed taking multiple first-half sacks behind a Joe Moore semifinalist offensive line that had -9 first-half rushing yards. But Reed had 3 first-half turnovers and looked completely rattled in ways that he hadn’t since he became A&M’s QB1 last year.
It wasn’t any better on the other side of the ball. Against a first-time play-caller in South Carolina interim OC Mike Furrey, A&M didn’t sack LaNorris Sellers once in the first half. Mind you, that was an A&M defense who ranked No. 1 in FBS in sacks per game against a South Carolina that allowed Sellers to be sacked more than any quarterback in America.
Again, nothing made sense in the first half. I cannot emphasize that enough.
With all due respect to Shane Beamer and his mid-game quote that it wasn’t surprising to see his team leading against a team that the Gamecocks beat by 24 points last year, it was stunning. It was the type of result that was so stunning that it could’ve put A&M into an all-or-nothing game against Texas to make the Playoff. Remember, you couldn’t even get odds on A&M to make the Playoff after the Week 11 win at Mizzou. That’s how much of a certainty it was. Like, even in the craziest scenario in which A&M lost to both South Carolina and Texas, surely a 10-2 mark with the Notre Dame win would still be enough. But getting destroyed at home vs. 3-win South Carolina? That would’ve changed that conversation.
Fortunately for the Aggies, they won’t have to entertain that possibility because it replaced Jekyll and Hyde with those 28 unanswered points in the second half. What sparked things, you ask? Was it the state trooper asserting his dominance after that South Carolina touchdown? Nah, that’s like saying the fan who shouts “let’s goooooo” on the jumbotron is actually the one who jump-starts a rally.
Go back to 4th-and-12 on the first possession of the second half. It’s when Reed did the thing that he inexplicably did on only a handful of times in the first half — run. Down 30-3, his 16-yard scramble at midfield prevented A&M from giving the ball back, and ultimately, that’s what got the ball rolling on that historic comeback.
In the second half, Reed led an A&M offense that out-gained South Carolina 271-76. Reed had 203 passing yards in the third quarter alone.
Reed shook off a 6-for-19 first half and finished the game with a 16-for-20 showing for 298 yards in the second half. Time will tell how that impacts Reed’s Heisman Trophy aspirations. That was on the back burner in the second half. All that mattered was that A&M avoided becoming the 287th consecutive SEC team to lose a conference game after trailing by 27 points.
Mission accomplished? Sure.
The spin zone of Saturday’s roller coaster was that it put a Playoff-bound A&M in a hole that’ll likely be steeper than perhaps any Playoff team will see in the regular season. A&M hadn’t been in those situations much at all. In fact, before Saturday, the last time the Aggies trailed in the final 25 minutes was Week 3 at Notre Dame. Reed and Co. made the plays needed late to pull that one out. This one, in just about every way, felt different.
Call A&M resilient, call A&M a fraud, call A&M whatever. Lord knows that this team has already been called all of it.
You know what else you can still call A&M, though? Undefeated. Like, 10-0 for the first time since 1992. Like, 1 of 3 undefeated teams left in the sport. That’s an ideal place to be … even if it felt like wearing maroon at Kyle Field felt like the worst place to be for a couple hours on Saturday.
The Aggies will file that one away come Playoff time. If they’re able to build off whatever experience that was on Saturday, the Aggies could be better for it.
For now, though, the only thing that’s undeniable is that there’s no clear way to explain whatever happened in College Station on Saturday.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
