Was A&M a big red herring, considering the stats from it, and this game’s second half performance?

Answers from AoG:

Tom Stephenson: Oh. Are we playing this game already?

So if I had to make a comparison on the A&M game, it was the Ole Miss game from 2015, right down to the fact that the game was played on September 26. It was a road game against a top 10 team, and while Texas A&M this season is probably as much a top 10 team as that Ole Miss team was a top 3 team, it was a game that on paper should not have been close (and in both cases, the stats basically support that assertion) but that Vanderbilt managed to hang around in not-insignificant part because the other team insisted on trying to fart the game away.