5 Things Auburn Football Did Wrong Against Texas A&M

Poor Tackling

The defense is by far the best part of Auburn football in 2016, but they struggled a lot against Texas A&M on Saturday night.

From the very beginning the tackling reminded me of defenses in year’s past. We’d be in good position to make the tackle, but for whatever reason we couldn’t bring them down.

That’s very uncharacteristic from how the defense played in the first two games of the year.

A lot of that was in the backfield were Texas A&M quarterback Trevor Knight was able to avoid several sacks and extent the play. It must have happened 10 times last night where we had Trevor Knight sacked only for him to break free and run for a first down.

In the end Knight ran the ball 12 times for 59 yards (42 net), with a long of 16. I said before the game our linebackers would have to contain Knight when he took off, but that didn’t happen.

The secondary really struggled to bring down Texas A&M’s big receivers, allowing them to get several yards after contact.

In the end, the defense gave up 478 total yards and 29 points. They gave up 231 yards on the ground in 37 attempts for 6.2 yards per carry, and 247 through the air.

We had just 1 sack and 4 tackles for a loss.

Hopefully this game will become an outlier rather than the norm for this defense, but the tackling looked too much like the past couple of years.

Next: Lack of Explosive Plays