KC Concepcion<\/a>. His wicked cut back toward the middle of the field right in front of the LSU bench was the beginning of the end for the Tigers, who\u2019ve now lost three of their last four games.<\/p>\nBy the time the fourth quarter started, the yellow seats in the lower deck of Tiger Stadium were hard to miss as the Texas A&M fans and band celebrated in their corner of the end zone and wore out the Aggie War Hymn.<\/p>\n
The Texas A&M players, thanks to strength coach Tommy Moffitt, had a little extra motivation. Moffitt came in with Elko to Texas A&M, but was at LSU \u2014 going back to the Nick Saban days \u2014 before not being retained by Kelly.<\/p>\n
\u201cCoach Moffitt got some Gatorade poured on him at the end of the game by the O-line for sure,\u201d Reed said. \u201cCoach Moffitt wanted this game just as bad as anyone else, and I remember Thursday, he brought in a tackling dummy with Brian Kelly\u2019s face on it. We all started kicking and stomping and stuff like that. But yeah, this one was an important one to him.\u201d<\/p>\n
It will undoubtedly be a long two weeks for Kelly, who has become a tackling dummy of sorts by fans. One held up a sign Saturday reading: Kelly Gotta Geaux. LSU has a bye next Saturday before traveling to Alabama on Nov. 8.<\/p>\n
\u201cGuys are playing hard and I know they were (tonight),\u201d Kelly said. \u201cThey prepared their tails off this week, and if that\u2019s not happening, then that\u2019s a football issue. The football buck starts with me. I have to take a good, hard look at what we\u2019re doing and how we\u2019re doing it both from a personnel standpoint and from a coaching standpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even though Elko wasn\u2019t interested in a history lesson, he did put into perspective for his team how long it had been since Texas A&M last one in Baton Rouge.<\/p>\n
\u201cI still don\u2019t know that nationally there\u2019s a complete understanding of what it\u2019s like in these SEC away venues and it\u2019s no disrespect to any other conference,\u201d Elko said. \u201cBut it\u2019s just different. \u2026 I told the kids this the other day, that I was the starting point guard on my high school basketball team the last time we won here.\u201c<\/p>\n
Flashing a big smile, Elko \u2014 whose build much more closely resembles an offensive guard in football than a point guard in hoops \u2014 joked: \u201cSo if that\u2019s any indication of how challenging it is to win here, you could put that image in your mind.\u201d<\/p>\n
After winning at Notre Dame the third week of the season and then getting a bye week, Texas A&M has now won five straight SEC games in five consecutive weeks. The Aggies have another bye week upcoming before playing at Missouri on Nov. 8.<\/p>\n
With the most important part of the season ahead, Elko shrugs at what the ceiling is for this team.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve probably still got a ways to go,\u201d Elko said. \u201cI think that\u2019s how we want to think about it. We want to continue to be in a growth mindset. We want to continue to grow every single week. And again, we\u2019ve said this repeatedly, that we have bigger aspirations for where we can go than anybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not just to the SEC championship game or even the playoff.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t feel like we have anything to prove to anybody,\u201d Reed said.<\/p>\n
Now to the playoff selection committee? That could be a different story. The first rankings come out Nov. 4.<\/p>\n
The Aggies own two true road wins against ranked opponents and still have the regular-season finale against Texas on the road.<\/p>\n
Once the SEC championship game is played, given how this season has gone, there could be five or six teams in the league that look exactly the same. And several of those teams still have to play each other. Heading into November, nine teams have two or fewer losses overall.<\/p>\n
What Elko knows for sure is that his players \u201cbelieve in who they are and what they\u2019re capable of, and they believe in each other.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BATON ROUGE, La. \u2013 We\u2019ll reconvene a month from now, maybe more like five weeks from now. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15996,15997,15998,585,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-21609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-kevin-concepcion-23-chambers","tag-marcel-reed-23-montgomery-bell-academy","tag-mike-elko-95-south-brunswick","tag-regwall","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}