Sunday Final: Time for Jimbo to hit the reset button

Fisher, and his team, laid an egg Saturday and everyone knows it. He does, the team does, the fans do and a national television audience does. The Aggies have played two top ten teams so far this year and have been ineffective for large parts of both of them. Some of that is because the other teams, Auburn and Clemson, are quite good. More of it has been because the Aggies have played quite badly.

“We have to play better and that starts with me,” Fisher said Saturday. “It’s on me.”

Not entirely, but yes, a lot of that responsibility falls on Fisher and his coaching staff. And Saturday, they didn’t do a job that any of them will be highlighting as one of their better peices of work.

The Aggies gained a mere 56 yards on the ground against Auburn, running the same slow and ineffective plays into the middle of the Tigers defensive line -- their absolute strength. The Aggies’ best runs came from the legs of Kellen Mond, who was either unwilling or was told not to run more. But the plays A&M ran were predictable, unchanged from any of the first three games of the year. That’s fine when they work, but the running game was useless against Clemson as well.

When Fisher was at Florida State, one of the complaints against him was that he had spells where he became tunnel-visioned and obstinate with his offensive playcalls. There’s no question the man knows what he’s doing, and far better than 95% of the coaches out there -- but there are times, critics said, when he just gets in a rut. Perhaps for the first time in his A&M, we saw that Saturday.

Perhaps as concerning was the lack of discipline. The Aggies fell prey to repeated mental mistakes, and those more than anything may have cost them the game. The secondary ran themselves out of the Anthony Schwartz’s 57-yard reverse for a touchdown; the linebackers and safeties let a tight end loose for another score from a formation that screamed trick play. Auburn ran what they frequently do on offense, and the Aggies looked unprepared.

A&M had one big play wiped out by an illegal man downfield on a big reception by Quartney Davis; Jacob Kibodi stopped running on a route that would have been a certain touchdown and Isaiah Spiller dropped a screen pass that could have been another. In the span of five offensive plays, A&M fumbled, gave up two sacks, had a delay of game coming after the sack and a false start. They had consecutive penalties on punts because they couldn’t get lined up right.

For a coach that preaches discipline above pretty much anything else, this has to be disconcerting. And it absolutely should be. There is no margin for error in the SEC West, and the Aggies have been error-prone in 2019.

At some point, virtually every program has to stop and hit the reset button and just go back to doing basic things. The Aggies still have a lot of talent, and they are capable of much more than they’ve shown. But they’re not executing the fundamentals necessary to build on. The program doesn’t need to be torn down, but the coaches need to go back and hit the team with a quick refresher course and start curing what ails them.

That’s not an easy thing to do in the middle of a season, but that’s where the Aggies are. And that’s why Fisher and his staff are extremely well-compensated.

This isn’t anything Fisher doesn’t know himself. He’s not a fool and he’s not blinded by ego. He knows what has to be done. Whether it can be done quickly is a question probably nobody can answer.

“We have to look at ourselves in all three phases … That starts with us and my staff and that goes on me,” Fisher said. “We don’t have a bad football team. We have just got to play better. I’ve got to get them to play better. That’s my job.”

Yes, it definitely is.