Postgame Thoughts: Texas A&M 35 - 28 Arkansas (overtime)

I have a lot of apologies to make here. I'll admit that I lost faith in the middle of the third quarter. When Arkansas went up 28-14, I genuinely thought the game was over. At that point I was internally (and externally) yelling at Coach Spavital, Kenny Hill and... damn near everyone.

But then...

Well then that 4th Quarter happened. And then that OT happened. And then somehow we managed to pull a game out of our butts and win the damn thing. Amazing. Outstanding. Clutch. Every single possible word to describe this is pretty much accurate. That sentence makes no sense, but I've had some beer tonight.

Hats off to the Hogs. Bert is building something there.

But tonight is about us. HOW ABOUT THOSE AGGIES Y'ALL?

Offense

Yeeeesh through three quarters. Everything felt completely off. We only had something like 96 yards through the first half, yet somehow ended up with 386 passing yards.

The gameplan was odd. There was a drive in the fourth quarter that almost drove me to drink bleach where we ran reverses and all sorts of seemingly random stuff.

Bottom line though is that when the game came down to the wire, we did what we did best. Kenny is a damn gamer and almost seemed like he was toying with the hogs to get to a 2-minute drill type of situation. That pass in OT was "us." It was the us that had been missing all game long. Simple route run well with a well thrown ball. That's it. That's what we had been missing, but we found it when we needed it. Malcome Kennedy has a storybook ending to the game... coming back from injury and catching the game winning ball.

There's probably a ton more I can say, but we'll just leave it there. The offense came through in the clutch. Lots of stuff to work on, but came through in the damn clutch.

Defense

Mark Snyder deserves for all of us to name our first born children after him. I'm not saying we were perfect, but we adjusted. We gave up close to 300 yards in the first half. Think about that 300 yards in the first half, yet the defense still wasn't the problem.

Then in the second half, we clamped down and gave up 150ish. Over and over again, our offense put our defense in positions where we had to make a stop, and we did. We freaking did. And then to top it off, Arkansas needed two yards to get into the game in OT and they couldn't get it because of our defense.

Mark Snyder gets a lot of flack from folks, me included, but today him, Price, Hagen, and Joseph deserve a ton of credit for pulling out this win.

Oddities did include no Shaan Washington (how much of a stud is that guy, huh?) early in the game and no Maestro (who struggled) late. But either way. We got it done. Period. Kudos to the defense on a great overall performance.

EDIT: It's now been pointed out to me that we gave up 90ish yards in the second half and 76 total yards on 5 posesions in the 4th quarter. h/t to @stlouis0. That's just enormously impressive.

Overall

This game was what we needed. We are a young team. Across the board at almost every position. Every time I got frustrated I had to stop and remind myself that I was getting frustrated by a true frosh or sophomore. But this young team grew up a lot tonight and learned that they know how to win. When their backs were against the wall, they did what they had to do and won the damn game.

I'm not saying it was pretty, but man it sure was satisfying. Time to regroup, watch film, fix things and BEAT THE EVERLIVING HELL OUTTA MISSISSIPPI STATE.