Texas A&M states its case as the SEC's best against an LSU team that's reeling

BATON ROUGE, La. – We’ll reconvene a month from now, maybe more like five weeks from now.

The matter at hand: Who’s the best team in the SEC?

Until that time, we’ll stick to the facts. The SEC’s lone unbeaten team overall is the same one that went on the road Saturday — and granted Texas A&M didn’t play its cleanest game in the first half — but the Aggies still marched into Tiger Stadium (on a Saturday night, no less) and decimated a reeling LSU team 49-25 in a game matching two programs heading in opposite directions.

For the Aggies (8-0, 5-0), it was their first win over a ranked team in the SEC. They dominated the second half after trailing 18-14 at the break and looked very much like you’d expect a playoff team to look like as the calendar gets ready to flip to November.

Explosive on offense. Physical on the line of scrimmage. Resilient when things don’t go well early.

And uber confident.

“I mean, if they want to believe we’re real, they can. If they don’t, that’s not my problem, but I know we’re real, and then everybody in that locker room knows we’re real,” said Texas A&M quarterback Marcel Reed, responding to any skeptics that might still be out there. “We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing.”

At the top of that list is winning, and doing so in different ways, not to mention making history along the way. It was Texas A&M’s first win at Tiger Stadium since 1994, and it’s the Aggies’ first 8-0 start since 1992.

Also, nobody needs to remind Mike Elko, in his second season as Texas A&M’s coach, that this is about where it all started to crumble a year ago as the Aggies lost four of their last five games.

But that’s history, and Elko made it abundantly clear Saturday night that he was tired of talking about history.

“I keep saying this: It’s not about the past,” Elko said. “We’ve got to stop worrying about the past, thinking about the past, talking about the past. I’m excited for what this team is doing right now. This team is doing some really special things. I think we should enjoy it. I think we should stop focusing on last year. I answered three questions on our Wednesday media call about last year. I don’t understand why we can’t just enjoy what’s happening. We should enjoy what’s happening on an 8-0 football team.”

Enjoy was a word nobody on the home sideline was using Saturday night. For Brian Kelly and the Tigers (5-3, 2-3), it was another sobering referendum on where this program sits in Kelly’s fourth year in Baton Rouge. The Tigers are 4-6 in their last 10 SEC games, and the only thing that drowned out the boos was the whirring of footsteps as LSU fans poured out of the stadium by the time the third quarter was ending.

“I love playing in away environments,” said Reed, who recovered from two first-half interceptions to pass for two touchdowns and rush for two touchdowns. “They tried to put a quote out there that I said that Death Valley was underwhelming, and shoot, I guess it was. It didn’t do much to me.”

It’s the second time in two night games, going back to last season, that LSU has been routed at home. Alabama won 42-13 here a year ago. There was a time when “Saturday night at Tiger Stadium” meant something, usually something bad for the other team.

But not recently, and really, it could have been worse Saturday.

Texas A&M was its own worst enemy in the first half and trailed 18-14 at the break. Reed was intercepted in the end zone. Texas A&M had a punt blocked, and a 15-yard unnecessary roughness penalty on third-and-long kept alive an LSU scoring drive.

But then came the third quarter, which was another example of how efficient and well-rounded this Texas A&M team can be.

The Aggies scored three touchdowns in a span of six minutes and 39 seconds, one of them an electric 79-yard punt return by KC Concepcion. 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’ve now lost three of their last four games.

By 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.

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 — going back to the Nick Saban days — before not being retained by Kelly.

“Coach Moffitt got some Gatorade poured on him at the end of the game by the O-line for sure,” Reed said. “Coach Moffitt wanted this game just as bad as anyone else, and I remember Thursday, he brought in a tackling dummy with Brian Kelly’s face on it. We all started kicking and stomping and stuff like that. But yeah, this one was an important one to him.”

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.

“Guys are playing hard and I know they were (tonight),” Kelly said. “They prepared their tails off this week, and if that’s not happening, then that’s a football issue. The football buck starts with me. I have to take a good, hard look at what we’re doing and how we’re doing it both from a personnel standpoint and from a coaching standpoint.”

Even though Elko wasn’t 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.

“I still don’t know that nationally there’s a complete understanding of what it’s like in these SEC away venues and it’s no disrespect to any other conference,” Elko said. “But it’s just different. … 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.“

Flashing a big smile, Elko — whose build much more closely resembles an offensive guard in football than a point guard in hoops — joked: “So if that’s any indication of how challenging it is to win here, you could put that image in your mind.”

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.

With the most important part of the season ahead, Elko shrugs at what the ceiling is for this team.

“We’ve probably still got a ways to go,” Elko said. “I think that’s 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’ve said this repeatedly, that we have bigger aspirations for where we can go than anybody else.”

That’s not just to the SEC championship game or even the playoff.

“We don’t feel like we have anything to prove to anybody,” Reed said.

Now to the playoff selection committee? That could be a different story. The first rankings come out Nov. 4.

The Aggies own two true road wins against ranked opponents and still have the regular-season finale against Texas on the road.

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.

What Elko knows for sure is that his players “believe in who they are and what they’re capable of, and they believe in each other.”