A&M enjoying a once-in-a-century season
COLLEGE STATION — Texas A&M is best known in the traditions sphere for what happened on Jan. 2, 1922, when student E. King Gill suited up and stood ready to play for the Aggies and football coach D.X. Bible as the program’s first official 12th Man.
Gill never got in the game, the Aggies defeated mighty Centre College 22-14 in the Dixie Classic and one of college football’s revered traditions was born.
What happened the next year — and 100 years ago this spring — isn’t nearly as known in Aggies lore but perhaps is more impressive, and it also involves Bible and Gill: The A&M basketball team won a school record 15 conference games (in the six-team SWC) en route to a 16-4 overall record, and then called it a season.
There wasn’t anything close to March Madness in 1923 considering the NCAA Tournament didn’t crank up until 1939, another notable year in A&M history — when the football team won its lone national title.
Picture Jimbo Fisher also coaching the A&M basketball team, and you’ve got Bible and the Aggies a century ago. Like Fisher in 2022, Bible also won five games (with a 5-4 record) coaching the A&M football team in 1922, so it was far from the native Tennessean’s best season coaching football in College Station.
Basketball a couple of months later was a different story, as the 1922-23 Aggies won nine of their last 10 games to close out the regular (and otherwise) season, with Gill as an All-SWC playmaker (and here he was best known for standing on the grass at a football game in Dallas).
This bubbles up on its 100year anniversary because, for the first time in 100 years, the A&M basketball team has won a school-record (now tying the mark) 15 conference games.
“Our guys were wanting to win for one another, they were wanting to win to cap off a 9-0 home record in conference play and they were wanting to win their 15th conference game for the first time in 100 years,” A&M coach Buzz Williams said after the Aggies beat then-No. 2 Alabama 67-61 in Reed Arena this past weekend.
The Aggies (23-8, 15-3 SEC), ranked a season-high No. 18 in the latest Associated Press Top 25, started nonconference play 6-5 and as Williams said were “left for dead” following a home loss to Wofford. They were so good in league play, however, that as the No. 2 seed behind Alabama they don’t play until Friday in the SEC tournament, which starts Wednesday in Nashville, Tenn.
“We had too many turnovers and couldn’t make a shot with too many mistakes on defense,” Alabama coach Nate Oats said of the Aggies’ relentlessness on both ends of the court over the game’s 40 minutes. “They came ready to play, and it turned out to be a great game for the fans.”
A&M was 6-3 against SEC foes away from Reed, as well, boding nicely for a budding program under the native Texan Williams, in his fourth season with the Aggies, who have not made the NCAA Tournament in five years and has never advanced to an Elite Eight.
A&M has the additional carrot of perhaps competing in the Final Four only 101 miles from Reed Arena to NRG Stadium
and would need a bus and not a plane for the trek from College Station to Houston.
“We just keep that faith in one another and belief in one another,” A&M guard Tyrece Radford said.
Williams has experience coaching in the Elite Eight after he led Marquette to within a victory of the Final Four 10 years ago. This season, he was named the SEC’s co-coach of the year along with Vanderbilt’s Jerry Stackhouse in a vote of the league’s coaches, while guard Wade Taylor IV earned an All-SEC first team nod with Radford checking in on the second team.
The Aggies have made the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament on six occasions starting in 1951, with the most recent visit in 2018 as future Boston Celtic Robert Williams led the way. After blowing out North Carolina in the round of 32 in Charlotte, N.C., that season, the Aggies appeared destined for at least the Elite Eight but in turn were routed by Michigan in the Sweet 16 in Los Angeles.
A&M’s best shot at a national title in program history perhaps was 100 years ago, when Bible and Gill had the Aggies on a roll (save for a season-ending 18-12 loss to rival Texas that snapped a nine-game win streak).
As for the chances of the Aggies and No. 7 Longhorns reliving a little season-ending history and perhaps meeting just inside Loop 610 early next month in the Final Four, beneath a sea of evenly split maroon and burnt orange? That sounds like a pie-in-the-sky matter for another time.