Auburn Football: Offense gets shut down at Texas A&M

Auburn football looked good through three games. In blowouts of UMass and Samford, the offense was crisp and the defense was dominant.

A weird road trip to Cal, with a kickoff time of 9 p.m. Auburn time, could be excused as a reasonably clunky win in an unconventional spot. In the first season of the Hugh Freeze era, after that disastrous Bryan Harsin tenure, there was plenty of optimism on the plains.

The fourth game, Saturday at Texas A&M, was a sobering smack in the face.

This was the third game in a row that Auburn failed to score a single point in the first quarter. The tough offensive performance didn’t stop there, with the Tigers only crossing the 100-yard mark in the fourth quarter.

Auburn gained just 200 total yards, finished 3-of-15 on third down, and averaged just 3.5 yards per carry.

Neither quarterback was effective at all against the Aggies. Payton Thorne was 6-of-12 through the air for just 44 yards. Robby Ashford carried the ball eight times for just 25 yards.

It was easy to dismiss the Cal game, but in a far more familiar situation on the road at an SEC foe, the Tigers were as anemic as ever.

Ron Roberts’ defense kept Auburn in the game, scoring Auburn’s only touchdown and holding the Aggies to just six points in the first half.

A Eugene Asante scoop-and-score early in the with 12:31 left in the game seemed to flip the momentum in Auburn’s favor.

The next Auburn drive, down 20-10, started out promising but ended with an all-too-common result: an Oscar Chapman punt.

Two plays later, a 79-yard Amari Daniels run put the Aggies at Auburn’s four-yard line, and Le’Veon Moss found the end zone on the next play, putting any chances of an Auburn comeback to bed.

This was a sobering day for the Auburn Tigers. Hugh Freeze is making waves on the recruiting trail, but after the shape Harsin left this program in, it’s going to take quite some time for the on-field product to turn around.