Texas A&M Aggies and Mike Elko still hiding their best on defense based on Auburn HC Hugh Freeze comments ahead of Week 5 SEC game
Aggies may finally unleash more layers on defense against Auburn
Texas A&M is 3-0 to start the 2025 college football season. They’re a consensus top ten team in the nation. Mike Elko finally has the quarterback in Marcel Reed and the offense that Aggies fans have been missing for years. However, if this team is going to go far, the defense needs to get a whole lot better.
Coach Elko is a defense-first coach with plenty of tricks up his sleeve, but so far this season Texas A&M’s defense hasn’t looked like it at all. So much so that Hugh Freeze, the head coach of Auburn (A&M’s Week 5 opponent), pointed out the lack of complexity himself in his call with A to Z Sports and other SEC media this week. Will the Aggies reveal some new defensive layers coming off their bye?
Hugh Freeze knows there’s more to Aggies defense than Mike Elko has shown
For those unfamiliar, Auburn’s head coach Hugh Freeze doesn’t usually mind telling it how it is, and had no problem noting that A&M’s defense has been rather bland to start the season. He wasn’t negative, in fact he praised Elko’s system and the Aggies overall, but it seems he understands a more complex game plan might be coming this week:
“[Texas A&M] is more just, ‘We’re going to play base defense with great technique until third down, and we’re really, really good at it.’ Which, they are. Having an open week before us and time to do other things, do they have the capability of doing more stuff like Oklahoma did? I’m quite sure they do. Mike Elko is an incredible defensive mind. To this point, they’re just really dang good. They’re one of those teams where [it’s like], ‘We can get in four-down and we can play our base defense. Our guys can put hands on you, play our gaps, and not have to muddy the picture as much as some others may have done.’ It’s not that they can’t, but they haven’t had to, and they’ve had great success doing what they do. We’ll see what their game plan is for us, but to this point they haven’t had to do a ton of things to stop people.”
There’s some truth to what coach Freeze said about Texas A&M’s defense so far. They’ve played extremely disciplined gap-sound defense overall, mostly out of simple base defense looks. In many cases that’s worked, at least in playing the “bend don’t break” game against soft opponents to start the year and on a couple critical drives against Notre Dame. There have even been a few really opportunistic plays made (like the Scooby Williams interception in the post below) because players were exactly where they needed to be, but the predictability of the defense has been an issue.
The Aggies defense often forces longer drives than FBS average, but the team currently ranks outside the top 50 in red zone scoring allowed, yards per play, and total defense. They rank outside the top 70 in plays of 20+ yards allowed. They’re top 25 in plays of 40+ yards allowed because they’re always in the right spot to contain field-flipping explosives, but there are gaps to be taken advantage of when they’re mostly sitting back in simple base looks. That needs to change now that SEC play begins against Auburn this week.
What Texas A&M might unleash on defense against Auburn in Week 5
Now that the Aggies have had an extra week off to install more layers to their defense, expect Mike Elko’s unit to look a lot more exotic–more like it did last year, but hopefully with better results in year two.
What will that look like?
Instead of the same three and four-man rush looks with a possible spy dropping down for a clean-up stop over and over again the Aggies likely get linebackers Taurean York and Scooby Williams (if healthy) much more involved in pass rush.
Tyreek Chappell will likely begin disguising his role more pre-snap like he did back in 2022 and 2023 (he has the skill set to do many things), instead of simply playing pure slot defender or tight-aligned fake pass rush all game long.
And finally, there may be a lot more stunts and blitz action around Cashius Howell to get him more isolated in pure one-on-one pass rush attempts. Elko tried to do that with his defense last year, but the lack of discipline and timing left the Aggies gashed in the run game against better opponents. Hopefully that isn’t such an issue in year two of the defensive install.
Texas A&M Aggies News
Texas A&M Aggies ready to take advantage of Auburn Tigers one massive weakness as Mike Elko’s team kicks off SEC play
Aggies pass rush should completely clobber Jackson Arnold and his sack issues
Texas A&M shouldn’t have any problem getting to quarterback Jackson Arnold this week considering Auburn just took 10 sacks this past week against Oklahoma. However, it might take some more creativity from Mike Elko and his defensive group to finally shut an opponent down completely given they certainly haven’t been able to do that just yet. Aggies fans just need to hope that when Elko adds more layers this year it goes a lot better than it did in 2024.
We’ll be back with more Texas A&M Aggies coverage here at A to Z Sports soon! Follow me (@FF_TravisM) and A to Z Sports (@AtoZSportsNFL) on X for all the latest football news!
