Evaluating Texas A&M Football: 2016 Edition

Last year I put together a couple of articles evaluating the A&M football program from a couple of different lenses, including roster management and on field records. To tell you the truth my findings about roster management haven’t really changed, we still struggle with prioritizing recruiting to create quality depth. Kevin Sumlin’s tenure kind of feels like a broken record...here was my intro paragraph to the piece last year

Sound familiar? At any rate, below are a few rankings/numbers to spur discussion and sum up 2016. I’ll provide the numbers and then a few impressions afterward, but I’m really more interested to hear what you have to say.

So first off let’s look at records, both from this past season and over the last five.

• There’s Alabama and then there’s everyone else.
• LSU has that second place clearly wrapped up, and then there’s a middle area of meh.
• Despite having the nicest overall winning percentage, A&M has the 5th best record in the west over the past 5 years. That’s.....something.
• At what point does Bert start feeling some heat?

Now let’s look more specifically at A&M’s offensive and defensive performances over the past few years. I’ll include both overall rankings and S&P rankings (explanation for how S&P is calculated can be found here)

• Johnny spoiled us. He was so good
• The offense got better in 2016...but strangely the most marked improvement was in our passing game which seems counter intuitive considering Trevor’s strengths
• Rushing defense was better than it was last year...although I wonder whether there’s a way to see the trend line from game 1 to game 12
• Passing defense was much worse than it was last year.
• Total defense numbers from 15 to 16...well let’s just say its not good.

So those are the facts. What do you think? Give us your best analysis in the comments.