Loss puts pressure on Aggies to finish strong
With 5 challenges left, winning out becomes necessity to make the playoff
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Texas A&M’s players, bruised and beaten Saturday night, gathered in the Fail Room of Bryant-Denny Stadium after failing to upend the nation’s No. 1 team and spoke of one fundamental subject — flourishing as they move forward.
“All of our hopes and dreams and things like that are right in front of us,” senior quarterback Trevor Knight said in the interview room, the visiting team’s portion of the stadium that is named for the late James Fail, a Crimson Tide donor.
Top-ranked Alabama continued its mastery of opponents this season with Saturday’s 3314 victory over the Aggies, who dropped from sixth to ninth in the latest Associated Press poll. The Aggies (6-1, 4-1 SEC) would have preferred an upset, but they also are aware that remaining in the top 10 this late in the season might mean big things a month from now.
“That was a good football team we just played,” A&M coach Kevin Sumlin said. “We’ve got a lot of football to play. I haven’t done this very long, but I’ve done it long enough to know that anything can happen in this league. We all know it.”
The road ahead
Anything can happen nationally, as well, with yet another example occurring Saturday at Penn State, when then-No. 2 Ohio State fell 24-21 to the unranked Nittany Lions.
Five of the Aggies’ first seven games were against opponents ranked in the Top 25 at one time or another.
And of their five remaining games, only one opponent is ranked — No. 19 LSU.
Texas A&M led Alabama 14-13 in the third quarter, but did not score again in the 19-point loss.
“What we have to do is learn from what happened in a bigtime game and not let those things happen again when we’re in that situation,” Sumlin said. “To fix our own problems week to week and not look down the road or circle games and all of that other stuff. And then, we need to let everything else take care of itself.”
The Aggies likely will be favored in all of their remaining games as they try to finish the regular season with one loss for the first time since 1994, when they were 10-0-1. A&M hosts New Mexico State on Saturday before visiting Mississippi State on Nov. 5. The Aggies then close out their regular season with three consecutive home games against Mississippi, UTSA and LSU.
Examples to go by
A&M also will rely on recent history to keep optimistic about its chance of making the fourteam College Football Playoff. Five years ago, LSU defeated Alabama 9-6 in the regular season, but the teams met again in the national title game, where the Crimson
Tide turned the tables on the Tigers in a 21-0 triumph.
Four years ago, A&M defeated Alabama at Tuscaloosa, but things again broke the Crimson Tide’s way, and they wound up with another national title. Knight, a transfer from Oklahoma, can intimately relate to what happened last season with the Sooners.
“Don’t let this ruin our season,” he said after Saturday’s loss. “I was a part of a team last year that had a bad loss to Texas early on in the season and ended up winning out and going to the College Football Playoff. If you want to look ahead, and we somehow win the rest of our games and we come out 11-1, and our only loss is to the No. 1 team in the country, that’s what we’re going for.”
The Aggies know they will need help to make the playoff, but stranger things have occurred.
“It’s happened before, where a one-loss team gets to experience everything they want to experience at the end of the year,” Knight said.
To have that chance, Sumlin said the Aggies have plenty of work to do to be considered worthy of playoff consideration or even a prominent bowl.
“In a tight ballgame against an elite team, you can’t flinch, and we did,” Sumlin said. “Our guys played hard, I mean really hard. That was a very physical game, with some real collisions out there. … We have to be better in those situations, if we’re going to have (more) opportunities going forward.”