BATON ROUGE, La. — Marcel Reed passed for two touchdowns and ran for two more scores, and No. 3 Texas A&M turned a slim halftime deficit into a dominant 49-25 victory over 20th-ranked LSU on Saturday night.
KC Concepcion caught one of Reed's TD tosses and returned a third-quarter punt 79 yards for another score for the unbeaten Aggies (8-0, 5-0 SEC). They snapped a six-game skid in LSU's Tiger Stadium, winning there for the first time since 1994 — when 48-year-old Aggies coach Mike Elko said he was starting at point guard for his high school basketball team.
At halftime, Elko said he told his players, "You are the better team ... and if you don’t play better football, you are going to let one slip away.”
The message hit home, and now A&M is off to its best start since the 1992 Aggies went 12-0 in the regular season before losing to Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl.
“We want to be a program that achieves things. We don’t want to be a program that just talks about what they want to achieve, what we should achieve, what we are capable of," Elko said. “Right now, you are seeing the culmination of that — a group of kids who understand that there is a lot of work into being successful, and then go out there and fight for 3 1/2 hours.”
Reed passed for 202 yards and rushed for 108, highlighted by his 41-yard TD scramble, as he continues to build a case for Heisman Trophy consideration. Reed's other touchdown pass was a short flip to running back Jamarion Morrow, who covered most of the play's 24 yards after the catch. Morrow added an 11-yard TD rushing in the fourth quarter.
Garrett Nussmeier, who eschewed the 2025 NFL draft to return to LSU (5-3, 2-3), saw his highly anticipated senior season continue to crumble.
He passed for 168 yards, including a short TD pass to Trey'Dez Green, but was sacked five times and pulled from the game with 6:02 left.
“We were struggling in protection and thought it would have been unfair” to leave Nussmeier on the field with the game out of reach, LSU coach Brian Kelly said. “To have him get injured at that point would have been malpractice."
LSU led 18-14 at halftime, thanks to big special teams and defensive plays in the second quarter.
Jhase Thomas blocked an Aggies punt through the end zone for a safety.
A.J. Haulcy's interception in the end zone set up freshman Harlem Berry's 7-yard touchdown run that gave LSU a 15-14 lead.
Soon after, linebacker Harold Perkins intercepted a deflected pass near midfield. But LSU stalled inside the Aggies 20-yard line and settled for Damian Ramos' field goal for an 18-14 halftime lead.
“Early on, we were a bit too much into the emotions of it all and weren’t handling our emotions the right way,” Elko said. "In the second half, we played clean football and played mistake-free football. When we do that, we are really good.”
The Aggies scored two touchdowns in the first 6:13 of the third quarter — the first on Reed's 5-yard run on third down. LSU's next drive lasted three plays before Grant Chadwick's 60-yard punt gave Concepcion space to elude tacklers along the left sideline before cutting right into the open field and racing away to make it 28-18.
When Nate Boerkircher scored on a 1-yard run early in the fourth quarter, the Aggies led 42-18 — and Death Valley, where a raucous crowd produced ear-ringing volume in the first half, got quiet as fans began filing out.
"Nobody’s more disappointed than our football team," Kelly said. “Our fan base should be upset. They have every right to be. That second half was unacceptable on any level.”
Vindication story
The Aggies made strength and conditioning coach Tommy Moffitt — who held a similar post at LSU for two decades — central to their post-game celebration, in part because he'd been fired by Kelly in December 2021.
Reed said Moffitt put Kelly's face on a tackling dummy on Thursday.
“We all started kicking and stomping it,” Reed said. "Definitely we played a little of this game for Moffitt.”
Elko credited Moffitt for the Aggies' second-half dominance in victories over LSU this season and in 2024. A&M has outscored LSU 66-13 in those halves.
The takeaway
Texas A&M: The Aggies continue to snap unflattering streaks, the Tiger Stadium skid being the latest. Their 41-40 victory at Notre Dame last month was A&M's first on the road against a Top 10 team since since 2014. A 45-42 victory at Arkansas on Oct. 18 was the Aggies' first SEC road win since 2022.
LSU: Kelly's fourth season with the Tigers has taken a bad turn after it began with his team viewed as a favorite to make the 12-team College Football Playoff. LSU was ranked as high as No. 3 in the AP Top 25 Poll in September. After consecutive losses to Vanderbilt and A&M, they might not be ranked next week.
Up next
Texas A&M: At Missouri on Nov. 8.
LSU: At Alabama on Nov. 8.
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