Is Texas A&M Aggies Coach Jimbo Fisher Seeing Things Clearly?
The South Carolina win over the Texas A&M Aggies marked the first-ever victory for the Gamecocks in the series history. Before that, the Aggies were 8-0 against their SEC foe and beating them was more of a formality each season.
This year, it was A&M that looked like the little brother, falling behind 17-0 to start the game as the crowd at Williams-Brice Stadium crescendoed to a deafening roar.
To their credit, the Aggies did battle back to within three points on a couple of occasions and lost only by single digits. But should losing by six really be the metric for success? A&M coach Jimbo Fisher seems to think so.
"We've got good players and we've got a good system," Fisher said after the game."We're right there. It's not like we're getting ran out of the stadium."
Not getting run out of the stadium by South Carolina, whose quarterback Spencer Rattler has thrown more interceptions than touchdowns this season, is not exactly a building block for success. At the beginning of the year, most would have written this meeting off as a surefire win for Texas A&M, but now it seems like a sign of things to come.
Fisher's already asked for nearly $100 million over the next 10 years, and he's gotten it. But if he wants Aggies fans to be optimistic after a two-score loss to a middle-of-the-pack Gamecocks team, he may be asking a little too much.
He did, however, go on to say that it's not a matter of close games or blowouts, but rather wins and losses.
"It doesn't matter if you're ran out or one play [away]," Fisher added. "Guys are right there, how hard they're playing, and the belief they have in what we're doing. We've just gotta keep executing and we'll find a way to make a play or two and all of the sudden, you'll get over the hump. That's just the way it goes."
After a three-game losing streak, it's hard to feel like the Aggies are anywhere close to getting over the hump. It's not so much a hump A&M has to get over, but a hill that it has to climb, one that it slid down from the top of. Texas A&M may be "a play or two" from beating South Carolina (or an Alabama team that's missing its best player), but they're a country mile away from the College Football Playoff, which is where a lot of people thought they'd be.
The biggest problem for the Aggies isn't that they're 3-4. It isn't the fact that the offense can't score, or that the Aggies are unranked, and it isn't even that they're on a three-game losing streak. It's that Fisher sees all this as OK. In his eyes, this is all just part of the process, and maybe there's some truth to that, but the desired end result doesn't look like it's anywhere in sight. Despite his best arguments that the system's working, it may be time for some changes in College Station.
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