Auburn’s seniors celebrated their final game at Jordan-Hare Stadium with a victory on Saturday night, defeating Texas A&M 43-41 in four overtimes.

It was a thrilling victory for Auburn, a team that had many close losses this season but never seemed able to pull off the big win. It discovered that win against Texas A&M and now has a chance to become bowl eligible with a win against Alabama in the final week of the regular season.

The performance itself was up and down for Auburn, but the Tigers will be happy with the outcome more than anything else.

Here’s how we rated the Tigers’ performance against Texas A&M:

Offence

Grade: B+

This was a difficult figure to give. Auburn had fits where it looked unstoppable offensively, but in other parts of the game it looked incompetent.

The Tigers finished with a total offensive margin of 469 yards, a more than respectable number. The early part of the game was the highlight, with Auburn quickly scoring 21 points, mostly on explosive passing plays.

Cam Coleman and KeAndre Lambert-Smith both went over 100 receiving yards for the second straight game, with most of those yards coming on chunk plays.

While much of the middle portion of the game was hot and cold due to foul play, the unit deserves credit for the two-minute drive that sent the game into overtime. It was perhaps Auburn’s best two-minute drill of the season, a scenario in which the Tigers struggled.

There was still some inconsistency that kept this number from getting higher, but the offense overall played a good game against a solid defense.

Defense

Grade: C+

The defense was not as bad as the 41 points they gave up suggested, but they did have one of the more difficult games in recent weeks.

Texas A&M’s offense was methodical all game, consistently putting together long drives, helped by the Aggies going 10-for-19 on third down.

There were also a few glaring mistakes in the secondary, the biggest of which was a slant that turned into a 73-yard touchdown after Jay Crawford missed a pass breakup attempt and Jerrin Thompson took a bad angle to try to make a tackle.

The defense did get its fair share of action, though, with freshmen Demarcus Riddick, Malik Blocton and Kaleb Harris all standing out. Marcel Reed’s dual-threat ability created challenges for the unit, but Auburn did a good job of containing him, sacking him four times.

It wasn’t the lights-out performance we’ve seen from Auburn’s defense in recent weeks, but it wasn’t bad either.

Special teams

Grade: C-

Without some big kicks late in the game by Ian Vachon, this figure would be much lower.

Auburn was clean on its return against Texas A&M, but senior punter Oscar Chapman had a pair of uncharacteristically bad kicks. This allowed Texas A&M to control field position during the middle portion of the game.

Vachon also had a pretty bad missed field goal from 40 yards out, a kick for which even his head coach criticized him. However, he redeemed himself by making a 29-yard field goal to send the game to overtime and a 41-yarder in overtime.

All’s well, things end well, and that’s the case for Auburn’s special teams against Texas A&M.

Coaching

Grade: B+

Like the offense, the coaching had some highs and lows.

The offensive game plan to start the match was almost perfect. Auburn used tempo, something that clearly threw Texas A&M’s defense off early. The offense was also able to exploit some holes in the defense with RPOs and generally kept the unit off balance for much of the first half.

Things dried up a bit midway through the match, but no particularly egregious or game-changing decisions were made.

On the final two possessions, there were some questionable calls – such as running the ball with less than a minute left and no timeouts – and poor execution with pre-snap penalties. That is not just about coaching, but it makes you wonder what is the cause of so many mistakes.

At the same time, the two-minute drive to tie the game was one of the few times this season that Auburn was successful in a two-minute drill.

When Auburn answered Texas A&M’s touchdown with its own in the first overtime, some could make an argument for going for two there, but Freeze’s decision to score the extra point clearly paid off.

General

Quality: A-

While none of the individual unit marks were that high, there is no game completion category. Auburn’s ability to do that — something it hasn’t done in close games all season — gives it the high score here.

So many times this season, Auburn found itself competitive with a good team, but couldn’t stay out of its way enough to win. That finally worked against Texas A&M and that means something in the context of the season.

Freeze even said after the game that he believes Auburn could be a one- or two-loss team given the nature of many of the previous losses. That’s a futile exercise now, but Saturday was a demonstration of what Auburn might have been capable of all along if it hadn’t consistently beat itself.

Peter Rauterkus covers Auburn Sports for AL.com. You can follow him on X on @peter_rauterkus or email him [email protected]M