Jimbo Fisher identifies key areas of importance in road games

Texas A&M is ready for the second of four road games this season, with a trip to Tennessee this weekend just the second foray away from the friendly confines of Kyle Field.

Coach Jimbo Fisher explained some of the challenges of playing on the road, particularly in a place like Knoxville with more than 100,000 seats.

“I think you’ve got to understand communication No. 1,” Fisher said. “I don’t care if because the noise factor you saw there, you think of just cadence or playcalls, hand signals, checks. You say the things you’re able to do sometimes offensively, things you can do at home is a lot easier because of the noise. You’re quiet. You can put a lot of checks in.”

It’s less doable to put in a lot of checks on the road. Not impossible, but it’ll be a little extra tricky for the Aggies already down their starting quarterback.

The good news is veteran backup quarterback Max Johnson also has plenty of experience, so the Aggies should be able to build in some wrinkles into the gameplan as far as the communication goes and be fine.

“On the road, man, you can do it but you’ve got to have an experienced team and they’ve got to be very deliberate,” Fisher said. “Some are verbal, some are by hand signals, some are from the sideline. I mean things that how you’re communicating, defensively same way, calls, checks, all those types of things. That’s the hardest, in my opinion.”

The most important factor in road games is simply making sure that everyone knows the call so they can go execute.

That’s a huge part of the equation.

“Because I don’t care what you say, all right, if I got my call and I’m a player then I’m locked into where my eyes go, I can play football,” Fisher said. “But then momentum swings, young players getting intimidated by the noise, things like that. Older guys learn to block it out as much as they can, but it still affects a lot of different things in how you play, and that’s knowing that you’ve got those folks there.”

Texas A&M didn’t handle its first road trip very well. The Aggies lost 48-33 to Miami all the way back in Week 2.

They’d like to have a different outcome in the rest of their road games.

“When you get to have a really good team and you’re going into somewhere and getting them quiet and doing that, the maturity that comes in there, you take pride in that,” Fisher said. “It’s hard to do.”