After Texas A&M’s 9-0 start — its best since 1992 — the Aggies seemed untouchable.
Defeating No. 8 Notre Dame, No. 20 LSU, No. 22 Missouri and a wealth of SEC opponents, they firmly established themselves as one of the top three teams in the country and seemed destined for a first-round bye in the College Football Playoff.
But a month later, the Aggies are the only one of the three teams that were undefeated at the time to miss out on a top-four seed and have to play in the opening weekend of the College Football Playoff. Despite finishing 11-1, missing out on the SEC championship meant missing out on a bye and having to host No. 10 Miami in the first College Football Playoff game at Kyle Field.
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The Aggies stumbled through their last few weeks of the season. They had to pull off the largest comeback in program history, overcoming a 27-point halftime deficit against South Carolina to escape with a 31-30 win. Them they played a meaningless game against an FCS opponent in Stamford before falling 27-17 against rival Texas to close out their regular season.
“We didn’t play a really good second half,” A&M coach Mike Elko said Monday. “I think we’ve looked at the tape. I think we’ve seen the areas that we were deficient in. I think we made the proper adjustments.
“By definition, it’s all in the past because it happened a while ago. We have to hit the reset button.”
The Aggies have to sit with the loss for 22 days before getting a chance to redeem themselves at 11 a.m. Saturday. It’s a lot of time to think about what went wrong, whether it’s an easy fix or whether the road to the national championship became far more complicated than it appeared in early November.
At that time, expectations may have been championship or bust for an A&M team dominating on both sides of the ball.
But Elko said those expectations were never fair to put on a team with a coaching staff only in its second year and a program that hasn’t won a national championship since 1939.
“That’s a lot of busts if that’s the only marker,” he said. “We’re trying to establish a championship-type of program. … I think we’re obviously in this thing to compete for a national championship for sure. We believe we can. We believe we’re one of the teams that’s capable of going out there and winning it. But I don’t know that you define seasons like that.”
However, despite being in the College Football Playoff for the first time and drawing one of the most difficult matchups of the first round, A&M’s coaches and players will consider the run a disappointment if they can’t pull off a win Saturday.
Knowing the crowd they’ll have at Kyle Field and the crowd they could have at the Cotton Bowl in Arlington, they’re set up for two home-game environments if they can play closer to how they did the first nine games of the season rather than the last three.
“We didn’t just want to make the playoffs,” Elko said. “That’s obviously the first step, but we don’t want to be the ones that just get invited and then have to go home.”
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The national narrative around A&M has quieted. Quarterback Marcel Reed dropped out of the Heisman race. Few are predicting the Aggies get by Ohio State — and some doubt they’ll get past the Hurricanes.
But for now, their season is still alive. What happened in the last three weeks — and the first nine — doesn’t really matter.
“We can’t afford the time to sit and sulk,” offensive lineman Dametrious Crownover said. “We had our time off to go sit and sulk about it. Now, we’ve got to go win a national championship.”
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