BATON ROUGE, La., — On a soggy Saturday night here at Death Valley, so nicknamed for all the visitors who have crawled up in here and died of embarrassment, history worked against Texas A&M. The Aggies hadn’t won here since ‘94. Before that, it was worse. Three losses for every win, including a winless streak covering the entire decade of the ‘60s.
But unbeaten and third-ranked A&M shook off its history here and a mistake-filled first half to preserve its best start since that ‘94 season in a 49-25 win over the 20th-ranked Tigers.
A 35-point run beginning after intermission that started the 101,924 for the parking lot with four minutes left in the third quarter allowed the Aggies to put their past behind them at last.
Now the history question is, can this A&M team do what no other has done since before World War II?
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“We gotta stop, like, worrying about the past,” Mike Elko said. “I’m excited for what this team’s doing right now. This team is doing some really special things.
“I think we should enjoy it.”
Pretty easy to enjoy a 24-point win, an 8-0 start for the first time since ‘94 and the comforting prospects of a bye week after five straight SEC games, the Aggie coach isn’t fooling anyone.
These Aggies are making history, one game at a time. But they’ve got to finish what they’ve started, something no A&M team has done in almost 90 years.
On one hand, for all the good they did themselves in beating a ranked team for the second time this year and only the 17th team to win at Tiger Stadium in the last 25 years, they’re still not much better off than they were last year at this time after beating LSU.
Back then, a 38-23 upset of the eighth-ranked Tigers at Kyle Field gave them a 7-1 record and pole position in the SEC going down the stretch.
Except unranked South Carolina subsequently clobbered the Aggies, who followed a win over New Mexico State with losses to unranked Auburn, third-ranked Texas and USC in the Las Vegas Bowl. A season that had begun with so much promise under Mike Elko had suddenly turned into a Kevin Sumlin 8-5 special.
For that matter, even when the Aggies have won here twice in the early ‘90s, they couldn’t quite get over the hump. R.C. Slocum’s teams didn’t lose a Southwest Conference game from 1991-94. The ‘94 bunch finished 10-0-1 but didn’t go anywhere because of a postseason bowl ban, back when the NCAA still did such things. The ‘92 team, which also won in Baton Rouge, went 11-0 and was ranked fourth in the nation when it lost in the Cotton Bowl to Notre Dame.
Funny, then, that this team has beaten both the Irish and Tigers. Seems like pretty good karma, if you ask me.
But Elko, a pragmatist at heart, knows the book on the Aggies when you get past the bluster.
“We want to be a program that achieves things,” he said after the win. “We want to be a program that not talks about what we want to achieve, what we should achieve, what we’re capable of achieving. We want to be a program that does the things it needs to do, to go out and accomplish things, right?
“And I think what you’re seeing a little bit is the culmination of that, right?”
Right.
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In the SEC, in particular, the Aggies have won a lot of games over the last decade or so. A real Johnny Football barnburner in Tuscaloosa. But they’re still chasing their first national title since 1939.
Handing LSU a 24-point loss at home was a nice next step.
Before exploding for five touchdowns in the second half, the Aggies contributed more than their share to the host’s cause. A pair of tipped Marcel Reed passes that turned into interceptions, a blocked punt for a safety and a dead-ball personal foul after a third down stop led to 11 of LSU’s 18 points. One of the picks came in LSU’s end zone, denying A&M a point-blank shot at points, and the other came with the Aggies driving at midfield inside two minutes.
Garrett Nussmeier proved a gracious receiver of the gifts. One play after the personal foul gave him new life at his own 42, the Flower Mound product threw his prettiest pass of the night: a 41-yard dime dropped on a well-covered Barion Brown.
If not for the gifts, which included 45 yards worth of penalties, a chronic problem with the Aggies this season, A&M might have taken all the bite out of Tiger Stadium early.
Elko’s message was succinct, as well as forceful.
“You’re the better team,” he told his players, “but you’re gonna have to play better football.”
That they did, putting together what Elko called the best half they’ve played on both sides of the ball at once. They’re getting the vision thing.
Minutes after the game’s end, where A&M fans had carved out a sizeable chunk of real estate in the southeast corner of Tiger Stadium, a chant suddenly went up. “El-ko . . . El-ko . . . El-ko.” Despite his protests, the big bear of a coach gets it, too. As he told his players going into the game, the last time A&M won here, he was a high school point guard. Maybe it really is a new day for the Aggies.
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