Week 6 – Missouri at Texas A&M

Week 6 – Missouri at Texas A&M

posted October 4

The Game

Yes, guy.

We’ve got a very important SEC game cooking at HIGH NOON on Saturday as Missouri travels to face Texas A&M at College Station. The Tigers come into town with a shiny 4-0 record but they needed 2OT to take down mighty Vanderbilt in their last game. Hopefully for Missouri fans the bye week helped shake that out of their system. The Aggies lost their opener to Notre Dame and haven’t been as good as we thought they’d be on either side of the football, particularly on offense. However, Texas A&M has rattled off four wins in a row and sport a record of 4-1 heading into this showdown. They’re mighty tough to beat on their home field.

Let’s gooo!

The Details

Texas A&M -2.5 Missouri (48)

MEGALOCKS LINE – Pick ’em

“Vegas” Implied Projected Score: Texas A&M 25.25 Missouri 22.75

Texas A&M offense vs Missouri defense

Will it be Conner Weigman or Marcel Reed at QB? It certainly hasn’t been very fun to watch either gentleman play QB as the Aggies rank dead last in the SEC in passing and #13 in passing efficiency (54%, 6.6 YPA). The ground game has been very good tho and they rank #2 in the SEC in YPG on the ground (232). Missouri has been solid vs the run (92 YPG, #19) and they held Boston College to a mere 49 (!) rushing yards on 26 carries in their win over Eagles. Texas A&M is too good to not have success with RB Le’Veon Moss (471, 6.2, 3 TD) and we think it would BEHOOVE them to start Reed at QB since he completes a nice 1-2 running punch with Moss. If Missouri gets a lead it’s gonna be problematic for Texas A&M as not only is their THROW GAME subpar, but the Missouri secondary has done fine work this year (50%, 5-4 TD to INT, 5.9 YPA), albeit vs much weaker competition than Texas A&M.

Missouri offense vs Texas A&M defense

Will the real Missouri Tigers stand up? The stats have been fine (#26 rushing, #37 passing) and Brady Cook has been good (69%, 4-1 TD to INT) but Missouri has struggled generating big plays (#14 SEC 20+ yard plays; LY #5). That’s really odd given that they have one of the best weapons in the country in WR Luther Burden but he’s been kept under wraps so far in 2024. Thankfully for Missouri, they’ve got some fine weaponry at WR and Texas A&M’s secondary has been a problem. They allowed 279/250/249 L3G thru the air and those teams don’t have a THROW GAME with the potential of what the Tigers bring to the table. Texas A&M has the most INTs in the SEC with 7 (tied with Texas) but Brady Cook is very smart with the football (6 INT LY, 1 INT in 134 attempts in 2024). The Aggies’ pass rush has been underwhelming and Missouri does a decent job of keeping the pocket clean. The best news for Missouri is that they have a balanced attack given the fine job that RB Nate Noel has done (441, 6.4, 2 TD). Texas A&M doesn’t give up much on the ground but Missouri will have to stick with it and hope they can pop one or two big runs like Notre Dame did back in week one.

Trends, Intangibles, and More!

Texas A&M has played the much tougher schedule according to the Sagarin ratings (#27 vs #143)…..Missouri is coming off a bye week whilst the Aggies will be playing for the sixth consecutive week….Missouri HC Eli Drinkwitz is 7-6 ATS as a road dog with the Tigers and they did well in that role LY with QB Brady Cook….They beat Kentucky on the road 38-21 as 2-point dogs and lost to Georgia 30-21 as 15-point dogs….A counterpoint to be made is that Missouri is just 6-13 SU in away games under Drinkwitz and they’ve had trouble putting teams to bed in road tests.

Summary

We think Missouri is the choice in this contest as they’re the more balanced offensive squad and have had a few weeks to prepare for a vanilla offense. It’s SHOW ME time for the Tigers if they want to be taken seriously as a CFP contender.

Conclusion

We’ll see if a +3 pops up by 5pm today. We might still play it at +2.5. At a minimum we’ll include Missouri on our list of ML underdogs. Stay tuned!

FRIDAY 4:30pm UPDATE

We added Missouri to the ML dog list. +3 not popping yet. We’ll just cheer for them on the ML.


‘Official play’ means that this is one of our favorite plays of the week (perceived value, match-up, coaching, trends, etc.). We’re currently investing 25% more on these plays vs our ‘leans’. We’ll normally have two or three of these choices per week.

‘Lean’ means that we’re placing a standard size wager on the game. We’ll normally have about ten of these plays per week. Many members prefer to pick and choose amongst these games when finalizing their weekly investment cards so we’ll continue to refer to them as ‘leans’.

‘No leanage’ means that we won’t have any action on the game.

Team totalsWe’ll list the implied number based on the point spread and total when our analysis is posted. If a team total ends up being an ‘official play’ we’ll post a widely available number at the time of pick release.