COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- Texas A&M made history on Saturday. And they did it the hard way.
The Aggies, No. 3 in the College Football Playoff rankings, stumbled and bumbled their way to a 30-3 deficit against South Carolina in the first half, then roared back to score 28 unanswered points and shut out the Gamecocks in the second half to win, 31-30.
It was the biggest comeback in school history, the largest comeback win in the FBS this season and the largest comeback in an SEC game in the past 20 years as they moved to 10-0 for the first time since 2012. SEC teams had lost 286 straight games since 2004 when trailing by at least 27 points, according to ESPN Research.
"I'm not lost for words very much, but I was lost for words with the team in the locker room after the game," Texas A&M coach Mike Elko said. "Ultimately, to score 28 straight points and win a football game that ends with a 99-yard drive, there's just not a lot of words for that. It's really impressive."
Nothing went right for the Aggies in the first half. Their star receivers dropped passes. Kicker Randy Bond missed two field goals, including a 24-yarder. Their Heisman candidate at quarterback, Marcel Reed, was 6-of-19 with 2 interceptions.
Texas A&M's unbeaten season didn't just hang in the balance. Their College Football Playoff hopes might have been dangling by a wire if they got blown out at home, then lost another game along the way.
"Having that one loss on our record, there's no telling what it could have done," Reed said. "The [CFP] committee could have done something a lot crazier than we would've expected."
At halftime, Reed gathered the offense and took responsibility for his own play. The receivers did too. The offensive line was struggling as A&M had minus-9 yards rushing. Linebackers Taurean York and Dalton Brooks met every player at the locker room door and told them to keep the positivity.
"I told the team, we're probably going to get six possessions and they can't score on any of the six possessions," York said. "Our biggest enemy is probably going to be the clock."
Elko said the Aggies practice a six-minute offense when they're down multiple scores.
"I've never had to do that to start a second half before," he said, laughing.
They set Reed loose in the second half and let him play with more tempo. And everything changed for the Aggies, starting with a play made by Reed with his feet on their first drive of the third quarter. After Reed threw incompletions on second and third down at the South Carolina 48, the Gamecocks' win probability reached 97.8%, according to ESPN Analytics.
That's when Elko decided to go for it on 4th and 12. As the play broke down, Reed scrambled up the middle for 16 yards. Two plays later, he threw a 27-yard touchdown to Izaiah Williams, the freshman's first career touchdown catch. All of a sudden, the Aggies came to life in front of the fifth-largest crowd ever at Kyle Field of 108,582.
"The vibes were good," Elko said. "The kids believed we were going to come out and win that game in the second half and whether they really did or not, that was the energy in the locker room. We made some plays early in the second half to get the momentum going, to get the crowd going, and then from that point it just kind of spiraled in our favor."
Reed shook off an abysmal first half, went 16-of-20 with three touchdown passes to finish 22-of-39 for 439 yards, the Aggies' first 400-yard passer since Kellen Mond in 2018, with Elko praising his star, saying, "that's what winners do."
York's projection came to pass. South Carolina, which had 312 yards in the first half, was held to just 76 in the second. The Aggies took the lead for the first time on a 4-yard run by EJ Smith with about 11 minutes left.
"For them to go out in the second half and do what they did, that's championship-level football," Elko said. "Obviously, in the first half we didn't do anything right, but at the end of the day we came out and we did what we had to do to win a football game."
South Carolina humbled the Aggies, 7-1 and ranked No. 10 at the time, last year, beating them 44-20 and storming the field. It began a slide that saw A&M finish 8-5. This year, multiple players spoke about the opportunity to erase that memory, even if it took a huge uphill climb to do it.
Elko said this could be an important lesson for the Aggies, sleepwalking through the first half of an 11 a.m. game against a team that came in 3-6, only to finish the job.
"If you take your foot off the gas, football will humble you quick," he said. "Clearly we weren't in the mental space we needed to be in to start that game. That's on me. I'm the head football coach. ... This game always finds a way to humble you if you don't do it the way it's supposed to be done."
Texas A&M has two regular-season games remaining, next week at home against 1-10 Samford, before a Nov. 28 game against Texas in Austin. Elko might not have liked the circumstances that led to the takeaways from Saturday, but he says he can appreciate the lessons.
"We've accomplished some things today," he said. "I think getting to 10 wins is going to set us up to continue playing football and continue chasing the big prizes. I think that they're going to have confidence and a belief that no matter what the situation in the game is, they're going to have a chance to win."