Maintaining momentum
After upsetting No. 1 Alabama, Aggies shift their attention to Missouri
COLLEGE STATION — Texas A&M defensive end Tyree Johnson, with elated Aggies fans still swarming Kyle Field, was ready to move on from A&M’s most astonishing victory in almost a decade.
“We can’t get distracted by this one game,” Johnson said following the Aggies’ 4138 toppling of then-No. 1 Alabama, the reigning national champions, late Saturday night. “We’ve still got six or seven more to go.”
Johnson and his teammates realize they need to shift their attention to playing at Missouri on Saturday if they intend to keep their fresh momentum rolling, but the afterglow in College Station was burning bright well into Sunday after the Aggies rolled the Tide at Kyle.
“It felt like there were 100,000 (fans) on the field with us the whole night,” said A&M kicker Seth Small, whose 28-yard field goal as time expired lifted the Aggies to the upset. “The ‘12th Man’ stands all game. The students — they don’t sit down. And it was packed the entire game.”
The Aggies (4-2, 1-2 SEC) had dropped from seventh to 15th to unranked in the Associated Press top 25 following consecutive losses to Arkansas and Mississippi State, but they hopped back in at No. 21 on Sunday following Alabama’s first loss since November 2019 against Auburn, a span of 20 games.
A&M fans rushed the field after Small’s kick squeezed inside the left upright, and video from the CBS affiliate in Birmingham, Ala., showed Alabama coach Nick Saban being hurried off the field by multiple police officers, with Saban, 69, tripping slightly on a cable along the way. An officer also shoved down a fan as the group neared the southeast exit tunnel.
“Everybody needs to remember how they feel and not forget it, because when I talk about having respect for winning, that’s what I mean,” Saban said. “You want to avoid the feeling you have when you lose, so there were a lot of lessons to be learned out there.”
Alabama under Saban had won its 100 previous games against unranked opponents dating to 2007.
“(The Aggies) made the plays that they needed to make to win the game, and we didn’t make the plays that we needed to win the game,” Saban said. “Hopefully, we’ll learn a lot from this. And we can still accomplish everything we want to accomplish, but we’ve got to do things better than we did (on Saturday).”
The Crimson Tide (5-1, 2-1) dropped from first to fifth in the AP poll, and Saban is hoping for a repeat of 2012 for Alabama. In November of that year, A&M upset the top-ranked Crimson Tide in Tuscaloosa, Ala., but Alabama recovered to win its final four games, including the 2012 national title matchup over Notre Dame before the four-team College Football Playoff began two years later.
SEC East power Georgia took over at No. 1, and the Bulldogs are followed by Iowa, Cincinnati and Oklahoma. Meantime, A&M coach Jimbo Fisher could not have imagined a better 56th birthday gift than an A&M victory following the two surprising setbacks to Arkansas and Mississippi State.
Fisher said the Aggies getting back on track in league action meant much more than Saban’s losing to one of his former assistants for the first time in 25 tries. Fisher, who was Saban’s offensive coordinator in the early 2000s at LSU, is now 1-4 against his old boss.
“Nick is one heck of a football coach … and I consider him a great friend,” Fisher said. “The thing that means something to me is our football team is learning to play against other good football teams and have success.”
Fisher added of a Saban former assistant finally beating the iconic coach: “It was inevitable — somebody was going to do it in time. It happened to be us, and that’s great. But that doesn’t mean anything to me, because that’s not a goal I’m trying to talk about or do. I want our program to do well; that’s the only thing I care about.”
Despite beating the nation’s No. 1 team, the Aggies likely are out of the SEC West and national-title races because of the two losses to start conference play. A&M behind sophomore quarterback Zach Calzada will try to finish out the regular season with six victories and perhaps make a New Year’s Six bowl for a second consecutive season under Fisher.
“We (lost) two games we shouldn’t have, and now we’ve got six left,” Fisher said of the season’s midway point. “It was a great win, and it shows you what you’re capable of. Now can we respond and understand how to go prepare like that on Monday and forget this thing and learn from the things we did well and correct the mistakes and move on and go play a good Missouri team?
“We’ll find out what it means in the future, how we respond to this.”
Missouri (3-3, 0-2) is coming off a 48-35 home victory over North Texas in a nonconference contest. The Tigers own a two-game win streak over A&M, from 2013 and 2014 and shortly after both universities had exited the Big 12 for the SEC.
“Coach Fisher is a great coach, and he tells us we can be a dangerous team if we all just come together and work hard,” said A&M running back Devon Achane, whose 96-yard kick return for a touchdown gave the Aggies a 31-17 lead midway through the third quarter Saturday. “We showed that we can be great. We’ve just got to keep doing what we’ve been doing.”