The good news, Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko said Monday, is that the Aggies cleared their historic road woes hurdle last season when they beat Florida and Mississippi State in conference play.
The bad — or, let’s call it, more challenging news — is that the next hurdle the Aggies need to vault over to take their next step as a program does not include a Bulldogs team that went winless in Southeastern Conference play or a Gators team whose coach’s name appears next to the word “buyout” when you type it into the Google search bar.
The 16th-ranked Aggies, if they hope to join the upper echelon of college football’s contenders, will one day soon need to topple a ranked program while on the road. Saturday, against No. 8 Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., represents their first of four opportunities to do so this season.
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Texas A&M has not beaten a ranked team on the road since it upset Auburn, then the No. 3 team in the country, at Jordan-Hare Stadium on Nov. 8, 2014. They’ve lost 13 straight since and are the only Southeastern Conference team without a ranked road win in that span.
Texas A&M beat the Gators and Bulldogs last season to snap an 0 for 10 drought away from Kyle Field’s friendly confines that dated back to the 2021 season. They still lost at Auburn and at South Carolina, though, and haven’t won more than two road games in a single season since the COVID-19 impacted 2020 campaign. The Aggies have three more road games this season against teams currently ranked in No. 3 LSU (Oct. 25), No. 25 Missouri (Nov. 8) and No. 7 Texas (Nov. 28).
“Now we’ve got to get over the ‘winning at night on the road against a top-10 team’ [obstacle,]” Elko said. “That’s the next hurdle for us to clear.”
Notre Dame Stadium, which houses north of 80,000 spectators, is not necessarily impenetrable. The Irish lost to Northern Illinois at home last year, Ohio State two years ago and two teams — unranked Marshall and Stanford — the season before that.
“I don’t know if it plays different,” Elko, who was Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator in 2017, said of Notre Dame Stadium, “but the thing I’ve always said to people about Notre Dame is you can just feel the history and tradition.”
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History suggests that Texas A&M needs to beat Notre Dame — or, at least, one of the three ranked teams that it’s scheduled to play on the road later this season — to solidify its case as a legitimate playoff contender. The dozen teams that comprised last year’s College Football Playoff field combined to go 43-7 on the road and 8-4 on the road against ranked teams. Half of the bracket had at least one ranked road win and the only two teams with a sub-.500 record in those games (Indiana and Boise State) were eliminated in the first round.
Notre Dame, which lost to Ohio State in the title game, had only one ranked road win last season. The Irish stormed into Kyle Field Week 1, flummoxed then-starter Conner Weigman and held the Aggies to just 3.8 yards per carry in a 23-13 win.
Sophomore Marcel Reed, who passed for seven touchdowns and zero interceptions in Texas A&M’s first two wins, provides a dual-threat wrinkle that Weigman didn’t last season and that Notre Dame didn’t see in its Week 1 loss to Miami and former Georgia quarterback Carson Beck. Elko said Monday that Reed, who exited Saturday’s win vs. Utah State with an injury, is good to play this weekend.
“I think they’re pretty well-entrenched in who they are and what they do,” Elko said. “We’re pretty well entrenched in who we are and what we do. And so that’s always an exciting chess match when you go into a game like that and you know the other team.”
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