There’s a multitude of worthwhile reasons to revisit Texas A&M’s early-season statement road win over Notre Dame after Sunday’s College Football Playoff bracket reveal.
For one thing: It undoubtedly had a say in where the Aggies are seeded and why the Irish were controversially omitted from the 12-team field. For another: It’s a reminder of what A&M will need to do to capitalize on the opportunity now afforded to them.
“I don’t think we were magically going to become a team where everything comes smooth,” A&M head coach Mike Elko said after his team’s 41-40 win at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend, Ind. “We had to kick a door down.”
The Aggies (11-1) kicked another down Sunday when they officially reached the College Football Playoff for the first time in program history and earned first-round home field advantage at College Station’s Kyle Field as the 12-team bracket’s seventh-seeded team.
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The turbulence — or, at least, the potential for it — comes next.
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The playoff committee’s bait-and-switch decision to flip Notre Dame and Miami at seemingly the last second cost A&M a rematch with an Irish team that it beat to kick start a historic season. The Aggies will instead host the 10th-seeded Hurricanes (10-2) who, like A&M, beat Notre Dame by a single score earlier this year and sharpened their playoff resume because of it.
The winner of that first-round game will play second-seeded Ohio State (last year’s national champion) in the Cotton Bowl Classic at Arlington’s AT&T Stadium on New Year’s Eve. The victor of that quarterfinal may have to play third-seeded Georgia (the SEC championship game winner) in the Fiesta Bowl one week later to clinch a trip to the championship game. Texas — the only team that beat A&M this season — lost to both Ohio State and Georgia earlier in the year.
There are nine teams ranked ahead of the Aggies in ESPN’s Football Power Index. Three of them — Ohio State (second-best FPI rank), Georgia (sixth-best) and Miami (seventh-best) — are on their side of the bracket and would be first or second-round opponents. Per ESPN’s SP+ metrics, which are measured differently than their FPI figures, the Aggies and Hurricanes have an identical rating but both lag behind the Buckeyes and Bulldogs.
Or, in other words, this ain’t Samford.
The Aggies will need to beat two of them to reach the national championship game. It’s no doubt a tougher path on paper than what Texas faced last season when it played three-loss Clemson and automatic bid Big 12 champion Arizona State in rounds one and two en route to a national semifinals appearance.
The Longhorns missed this year’s playoff, though, because a loss to a rudderless Florida team outweighed their wins vs. A&M, No. 7 Oklahoma and No. 14 Vanderbilt despite a hard-fought political campaign led by head coach Steve Sarkisian and company. The Aggies are seeded where they are in part because they beat the teams that they were supposed to beat and handled the conference’s bottom feeders (like Florida and Mississippi State) more comfortably than their in-state rivals did.
Their signature wins were what catapulted the Aggies into no-doubter status. Their Sep. 13 thriller against Notre Dame was the program’s first ranked road win in more than a decade. Their Oct. 25 romp against LSU was their first win at Baton Rouge’s Tiger Stadium in more than three decades.
Both — the first of which was nearly a walk-off and the second of which was a walk-down — were proof that Elko’s Aggies had shaken some big-game struggles and that quarterback Marcel Reed could meet the moments in high-stakes atmospheres.
The Aggies will need to channel both when the Hurricanes come to town and if the Buckeyes await them.
It could get bumpy if they don’t.
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