Texas A&M Football: Aggies are out of acceptable losses

Texas A&M football dropped their second game in four weeks, losing to Alabama in Week 4. That was the last “acceptable loss” for Jimbo Fisher this season.

When Texas A&M fans looked at their 2018 schedule entering the season they saw a pair of games against returning College Football Playoff teams. Jimbo Fisher was dealt any favors in his first season in Aggieland, but the 2019 schedule features the same two foes, Alabama and Clemson, plus a road trip to play Georgia. Life in the SEC isn’t easy.

It’s the sheer difficulty of this early season road that earned Fisher’s squad a reprieve from the pressure early on. Even though the Aggies are 2-2, nobody is calling for Fisher’s job and nobody is calling him out for not living up to his $100 Million contract, at least not yet.

It didn’t matter who Texas A&M had hired or how much money they had paid him, the Aggies don’t have the horses to beat both of those teams back to back. They will, but granting Fisher leniency early on is more than reasonable. Starting in Week 5, though, Fisher is out of free passes.

ESPN FPI lists the Aggies as projected favorites in five of their remaining eight games. The three games in which they’re given less than a 50 percent chance of winning are all on the road – at South Carolina (49.6 percent), at Mississippi State (48.3 percent) and at Auburn (33.5 percent). Fisher was hired to turn those coin flips into W’s.

Gone are moral victories. No longer will “coming close” be good enough. The Aggies are officially in win-now mode, and the expectations aren’t going to get any lower for Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M. If anything, they’re only going to get more and more demanding. He knows that; that’s why he took the job.