That was all Texas A&M coach Mike Elko said to quarterback Marcel Reed after Texas A&M’s second possession of the second half Saturday night sputtered to a halt.

Down 17-7 and scuffling with Conner Weigman at the helm, the Aggies needed something different on offense. After BJ Mayes picked off LSU quarterback Garrett Nussmeier to set the Aggies up at the LSU 8, they got it.

“Coach [Josh] Buford said to me, ‘It's you, let's go,’” Reed said. “I said, ‘All right, let’s go.’”

Reed entered the game with a little less than eight minutes to go in the third quarter and immediately flipped the game upside down, scoring on his first play from scrimmage to cut the lead to 17-14. It was a sign of things to come, as the Aggies exploded to score 31 second-half points and blow out the eighth-ranked Tigers 38-23.

Reed put up stunning numbers in a short period of time: 62 yards on nine carries, with three touchdowns, while completing both of his passes for 74 yards — one of which was a perfect 54-yard strike to Noah Thomas beating double coverage.

“We all had a chip on our shoulder. We didn't really think they respected us coming into Kyle Field,” Reed said. “So I mean, getting that spark in the second half and getting the team going, I mean, there was no going back from that at all. The team did a great job of answering.”

Reed answered the call after sitting on the sideline for two games, which had to be a bitter pill to swallow after going 3-0 as a starter when Weigman was out with a shoulder injury.

“(The) team’s got a lot of faith in Conner. I have got a lot of faith in Conner, and so do the coaches. It was his job before it was mine, and you can't take a job away from injury,” Reed said. “Conner is still a great quarterback, and he's done everything he can for this team, and he got us some wins, too. I’m not disappointed at all, and like I said, both of us are ready when our names are called.”

Even though the two are competing for playing time, Reed indicated that he and Weigman have a tight bond on and off the field.

“He came up to me said, ‘Let's go, you got it.’ I told him, ‘I got you,’” he said. “You know, we're brothers. We're teammates. I mean, I have his back, he has mine. So, you know, he was just as excited as I would be for him if he was in the game.”

Reed has completed 45 of 81 passes for 655 yards and six touchdowns while running for another 288 and five more scores while playing in six games. But the offense changed instantaneously Saturday night when the redshirt freshman came off the bench, switching to a scheme that utilized his strengths. “The coaches do a great job of having a great practice plan and then putting us through a lot of situations to where we have to prepare for them,” Reed said. “And I'm always in the room with Coach [Collin] Klein. Me and Conner [Weigman] together, we're all in the room together going over a little bit of extra and the things we need to focus on ourselves as quarterbacks and how to manage the game, how to manage the offense, and just play with some space and tempo.”

The emphasis on the zone read, which Reed ran to perfection, caught LSU completely flat-footed. The Tigers’ defensive ends repeatedly jumped on A&M’s running backs, allowing Reed to repeatedly pull the ball and make bi g plays himself.

“They were just crashing, crashing at our running backs … If they crashed, I pulled the ball and run,” he explained. “You see they did it a lot, and I got a lot of opportunities to get some space and run. And they didn't really make any adjustments, so that's all it was.”

Reed could hardly know it after the game, but he was on his way to being named the SEC Freshman of the Week and the Davey O’Brien National Quarterback of the Week. Individual accolades, though, weren’t on his mind. The Gamecocks were.

“We won this game, but it's on to the next. We're not worried about this. We're going to come here tomorrow, on Sunday, and start preparing for South Carolina, because that's the next game ahead. And we've still got a long journey on this season trying to get to where we want to go,” he said.