Texas A&M will visit Death Valley on Saturday to wrap up a home and home series that started with a thrilling 28-26 Tigers win last season in College Station. The Aggies are currently 19.5 point underdogs in the contest.
A&M is coming off of a blowout win over Texas State and there’s not really a whole lot to be gleaned from that game. Texas State was clearly overmatched but there were one or two takeaways.
A&M basically lost their entire front seven from last seasons defense. Sound familiar? The new look defense looked good against the Bobcats but that’s not saying a whole lot. We probably won’t know much about their defense until this game is over.
It is on the offensive side that a couple of things stood out. The Aggies lost RB Traveon Williams from last season and seemed to struggle on running plays designed to get to the edge. Aggie defenders having some issues on backside blocks on those plays was the biggest thing. If that isn’t shored up before Saturday, this Tiger D is fast enough to get into the backfield and have a lot of TFL.
Another thing was the timing on running plays. We saw a lot of 3 down linemen looks from the Tigers in the opener, but don’t expect that to be the case Saturday. It’s safe to assume we’ll see more of the traditional looks with 4 defensive linemen in an effort to blow up the Aggie running game and make them one dimensional.
Kellen Mond had a career night vs the Tigers defense last season but was never able to duplicate that performance the rest of the season. Forcing him to beat them through the air against what is expected to be a much improved secondary and trying to take advantage of two new offensive linemen, one of those being at center, looks to be a sound strategy.
There’s a reason the Tigers are favored so heavily. Don’t expect Kellen Mond to have a repeat performance against the Tigers this time around. Oh, and things like this certainly don’t help their chances.
