BUBBLE BURSTS
The Kevin Sumlin era at Texas A&M began with much promise, but it will end soon with a whimper.
Early splashes
The highlights of Sumlin’s A&M tenure came in waves at the beginning, and then flattened as time wore on. In late October 2012, quarterback Johnny Manziel and a prolific Aggies offense capsized Auburn on the Tigers’ home field. Auburn’s coaching staff trudged off the field that night following A&M’s 63-21 triumph, and thenTigers defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder lamented what he’d just witnessed.
“It’s embarrassing for me, it’s embarrassing for (coach) Gene (Chizik), it’s embarrassing for the Auburn people,” VanGorder said. “I can’t ever remember being a part of something like that.”
That was simply a foretaste of the feast to come for the Aggies in the state of Alabama that year, and the highlight of Sumlin’s six seasons occurred Nov. 10, 2012, in Tuscaloosa, Ala. That’s when Manziel directed a 29-24 victory over the top-ranked Crimson Tide, the first time in A&M history the Aggies had toppled the nation’s No. 1 team on the road.
“We really tried to prepare for him,” Alabama coach Nick Saban later recalled of the Aggies’ elusive quarterback. “But he has such a good, instinctive feel for scrambling and making plays and ad-libbing and making something happen when there’s nothing there. That’s kind of hard to prepare for.”
Later that season Manziel joined John David Crow (1957) as A&M’s lone Heisman Trophy winners, and the Aggies crushed former Big 12 foe Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl to cap what was easily Sumlin’s most captivating season at A&M.
The Aggies wound up fifth nationally in the final Associated Press poll, the first time they had managed a top-five showing to end the season since 1956, when Bryant was running the show before bolting for Alabama following the next season.
Simply, winning in the SEC came easy early on for Sumlin, who had inherited Manziel, raw but wildly talented receiver Mike Evans, and what became an NFL offensive line
from previous coach Mike Sherman. A&M’s defense that first year was thin, but had few injuries and a couple of veteran leaders in linebacker Jonathan Stewart and defensive lineman Spencer Nealy leading the way.
Would Manziel have won the 2012 Heisman Trophy if Sherman, who despised A&M’s move from the Big 12 to the SEC, hadn’t been cut loose the year before? Doubtful. Sherman by nature took a more conservative approach overall, and he likely would not have allowed Manziel to freelance like he did so much that first year in the SEC.
“There hasn’t been a moment too big for him,” Sumlin said in 2012 of his redshirt freshman deftly navigating the SEC West.
Talking a big game
In the offseason leading to the 2013 season, Sumlin’s bravado grew by bounds. He occasionally treated media that covered his program poorly, and was boastful in his speaking engagements across the state about what A&M had accomplished the season prior — when in reality the Aggies had still finished third in the SEC West behind national champion Alabama and LSU.
During a question-and-answer session at a Coach’s Night event in Houston in the summer of 2013, Sumlin was asked what a postManziel life might look like for his program.
“We don’t have to worry about that right now, do we?” he responded.
Turns out even the present-Manziel life wasn’t so great that year, based on the rowdy quarterback’s penchant for partying and even an autographs-forpay hubbub sidelining him for the first half of the season opener against Rice.
The Aggies finished 9-4 that season, what turned out to be their secondbest finish of the Sumlin tenure (the current team can match that record with an upset of LSU and a bowl victory). Manziel didn’t repeat as Heisman winner, and the Aggies needed a furious second-half rally just to beat Duke in the 2013 Chick-fil-A Bowl.
Many changes, same results
A year later A&M notched the first of three consecutive 8-5 finishes, and along the way Sumlin demoted an offensive coordinator, fired another one and fired a defensive coordinator in trying to recapture the Aggies’ early magic.
Alas, Manziel was gone to wherever the unpredictable quarterback had wandered off to (including a brief stop in the NFL), along with Evans and a remarkable offensive line that featured top-10 draft selections Luke Joeckel and Jake Matthews.
About midway through his tenure Sumlin tried toughening things up with the addition of defensive coordinator John Chavis from LSU — a move that overall failed in Chavis’s three seasons — and a new strength coach last offseason in the place of Larry Jackson, whom Sumlin had effusively praised all the way up until his firing.
The one consistency in all of this? Kevin Sumlin. Why the Aggies are replacing him in search of their first conference title in at least 20 years, and their first national title since 1939. For now, he’s got one final game at A&M to coach — and a last chance to finally beat LSU.
“I came here to Texas A&M to win football games,” Sumlin said this week. “What we do and how we’ve done it has been the right way. … As a coach or as a player, you can’t worry about what people say. What you can worry about is the response of your team and how they perform. That’s where my focus is right now.”