3 Things the Aggies have to do to beat Miami

1. Hit Miami early and hard with a couple of big plays. The conservative approach would be to try to grind Miami down with our running game and eat up a lot of clock in the process to shorten the game in a hostile environment. But Miami’s offense is anemic, and if the Aggies can build an early 10 to 14 point lead, it’ll be hard for them to catch up. The coaching staff should look to surprise Miami with a couple of strikes downfield and possibly a trick play or two. With explosive weapons like Bennett, Goodson, and McGee, the Aggie offense is capable of scoring quickly.

2. Dare Kyle Wright to beat us. Despite holding Louisiana Monroe to 110 yards passing, I still don’t have a lot of faith in the Aggie secondary at this point. And yet, I’d still rather have Miami’s QB try to make plays. Yes, he passed for over 200 yards and a touchdown last week, but that was against a team that was a 33 point underdog, and he just doesn’t strike me as a gamebreaker who’s going to make you pay for daring him to beat you. He burst on the national scene two years ago as a highly touted freshman in a season opener against Florida State, and while the ’Canes lost that game, he was anointed as the next Ken Dorsey. Well, that hasn’t exactly happened, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. He just gained his starting job back, and that’s only because the other QB was aggressively terrible in the OU game.

3. Don’t buy into the Miami mystique. There’s a whole lot of hoopla surrounding this Miami game, but the reality is that Miami is unranked, and the Aggies are ranked #20. But anyone who’s pretending that we’re going off to play another unranked ACC team like say, Georgia Tech, either is fooling himself or is thinking about the wrong sport. Fact is that the Hurricanes were the baddest sons of bitches in college football throughout the last two decades, and besides winning national championships they were an NFL factory that produced an embarrassing load of talent along the lines of Michael Irvin, Ray Lewis, Jeremy Shockey, Willis McGahee, and Kellen Winslow among others. But the key thing to remember is that this is Miami’s weakest team in years (Hmm, I guess they sucked last year too). They’ve got a new head coach who’s yet to prove himself, they got shellacked by Oklahoma in week 2, and the offense has been absolutely putrid. The Aggies picked a perfect year to play Miami, and we need to get it into our heads that this Hurricanes team carries all the brashness of the past without the same talent. I love my Aggies, but throughout the years I’ve noticed that we always seem to lose the nonconference games against teams that have such “mystiques.” Whether it’s Florida State one year, Virginia Tech in another, and Tennessee in a bowl game, we always seem timid in these kinds of situations. If Texas A&M is going to ever be the national powerhouse that it should rightfully be, it needs to start winning these winnable games against “mystique” teams. We need to be like how Oregon was against Michigan in week 2: the Ducks realized that this year’s Wolverines team was crap, and they unloaded that crap into the garbage dump with authority.

I have a bad feeling about this game. The last couple of weeks the Aggies coaching team has been saying that they’ve been saving their best stuff for Miami, and I want to believe them SO badly. I want to believe that our defense has been giving up big play after big play as to not give away prep material to the Miami staff, and I want to believe that we’re really capable of 300 yard passing games if we really wanted them, but my eyes know better. It’s like when your kid is coming home with a bunch of D’s and F’s on his homework, and he’s telling you that he knows what he’s doing and will get his act together in time for the big test. You want to believe him because he’s your kid, but deep down inside you know that he’s just fucked.

But dammit, if this Aggie team is like my kid, I’m like the crazy parent who thinks his kid can do no wrong: I’m saying that the Aggies will win 27-14.