Texas A&M Running Out Of Time To Live Up To Lofty Preseason Expectations

Image credit: Jace LaViolette (Photo by Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images)

The lights at Blue Bell Park burned a little brighter this February, and the buzz in College Station was unmistakable. Texas A&M wasn’t just opening a new season—it was stepping into a spotlight reserved for champions-in-waiting.

Consensus No. 1 teams are rare, especially in today’s fluid college landscape where rosters are reshaped overnight by the transfer portal. But the Aggies, ranked first this preseason by every major outlet, still stood in a class of their own.

Eighty percent of Division I coaches polled by Baseball America said the same: Texas A&M was the team to beat.

“Yeah,” one SEC coach told Baseball America in January, “they’re loaded.”

A new era had arrived under first-year head coach Michael Earley. It came with a deep roster, a swaggering identity and national title expectations that didn’t feel aspirational, but rather, inevitable.

Barely a month later, the shine faded.

The Aggies dropped 10 of their first 21 games, including their first four in SEC play to mark the program’s worst conference start since 2017. A team once viewed widely as a juggernaut now finds itself teetering, trying to reconcile preseason prophecy with the harsh truths of early-season reality.

“What no one else can see but me,”  Earley told Baseball America on Thursday, “is internally how much belief we have.”

Earley isn’t sugarcoating the results, though. He knows what an 11–10 record says, especially after it dragged his team from preseason No. 1 all the way out of the Top 25 rankings.

Finding immediate solutions, he said, is paramount.

“Losing is not the standard,” Earley said.

Despite impressive showings from freshman outfielder Terrence Kiel II and Penn transfer Wyatt Henseler, Texas A&M’s offense—once billed as one of the nation’s most dangerous—has struggled to produce.

The group is averaging just 6.7 runs per game and a paltry 1.8 in six matchups against Power 4 opponents. Entering the sixth weekend series of the season, Texas A&M ranked below the 60th percentile nationally in OPS, wOBA, wRC and wRAA, according to 64Analytics.com.

It’s in part the byproduct of uncharacteristically slow individual starts.

Outfielder Jace LaViolette, who opened the campaign as the No. 1 prospect in the 2025 draft, entered Week 6 batting just .231. Prized transfer newcomer Gavin Kash, who last year hit .300 with 15 home runs for Texas Tech, has homered just twice with a batting average hovering around .250. As a team, the Aggies are batting just .259.

It hasn’t helped that the lineup has been without several key offensive players due to injuries. Star sophomore third baseman Gavin Grahovac suffered a season-ending shoulder injury in February. Outfielder Caden Sorrell has yet to appear in a game due to a hamstring injury. Earley said he expected the 6-foot-3 sophomore to return in “some capacity” as soon as next week.

Roster turnover was also steeper than the preseason No. 1 ranking might have suggested. Outfielder Braden Montgomery, catcher Jackson Appel and infielder Ali Camarillo, three lineup regulars for the Aggies last season, have moved on to the pros.

The numbers tell one story: a team underperforming at the plate, struggling to convert traffic into runs. But Earley still sees signs that the bats will come around. For him, they typically do.

“My teams have always found a way to hit,” said Earley, who previously served as Texas A&M’s hitting coach. “Never would you look at one and say hitting is why they lost. Might not be the reason they won, but it’s never been the bugaboo.”

If there’s been a stabilizing force amid the early-season turbulence, it’s the Aggies’ rotation. Despite the team’s struggles elsewhere, their starting pitching has lived up to expectations and, at times, exceeded them.

Texas A&M’s 3.07 ERA ranks No. 7 nationally. The backbone of that success has come from its weekend trio of lefties: Ryan Prager, Justin Lamkin and Myles Patton. Together, the they allowed just 23 earned runs over 95.1 innings, serving as the collective anchor keeping the Aggies competitive, even as the bats have gone cold.

The rest of Texas A&M’s staff has shown flashes, too. Pitchers outside of Prager, Lamkin and Patton have combined for a 4.08 ERA—solid but not quite as suffocating. Notably, five of the Aggies’ 10 losses have seen them surrender the winning runs in the seventh inning or later.

Still, the team’s collective pitching efforts have been enough to keep Texas A&M in most games, even if the final results haven’t always reflected that.

It’s why, even now, Earley still sounds more optimistic than overwhelmed. For all the frustration, the ingredients he trusts most—experienced arms, competitive starts and internal belief—are still there.

“Guys are getting after it,” Earley said. “Nothing has changed. It’s complete buy-in. Hungry guys who want to win. The chip on the shoulder has changed to, ‘We’re gonna prove ourselves right.’ Because we know we’re good.”

Belief alone won’t change the scoreboard, however, not in an SEC gauntlet that only gets tougher from here. 

The Aggies will look to avoid a second straight conference series loss this weekend after falling 5–3 to No. 18 Vanderbilt in Thursday’s opener. Awaiting them next? A home series against No. 24 Kentucky followed by a marquee clash with top-ranked Tennessee in Knoxville.

The margin for error is gone. 

Texas A&M’s rotation might be good enough to keep it afloat, but without a spark from its offense, even elite arms can only do so much. If the turnaround is coming, it has to start now. Because the team that entered the season as a national title favorite is running out of time to look like one.

“Your behavior comes way before your results,” Earley said. “You gotta act like a winner if you want to be a winner.”