COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Looking for a spark in the third quarter while trailing LSU, Texas A&M coach Mike Elko benched his starting quarterback, Conner Weigman, and handed the ball to Marcel Reed.

A play later, that spark caught fire, with Reed scoring on an 8-yard touchdown run on his first play, then leading the Aggies to four touchdowns and a field goal on their next five drives to drive No. 14 Texas A&M to a 38 to bring. -23 win over No. 8 LSU in front of 108,852 people, the third-largest crowd ever at Kyle Field.

It was a remarkable turn of events, with LSU leading 17-7 at halftime. The Tigers had won 104 straight games when they led by 10 points or more at the half, the longest streak in the country, according to ESPN Research. The Aggies had lost 26 straight games by 10 or more at the break.

But Reed’s adrenaline rush ended both streaks and led the Aggies to their first 5-0 start in the SEC since joining the league in 2012.

Texas A&M struggled to find many openings in the LSU defense in the first half, with Weigman going 6-for-18 for 64 yards while the Aggies managed just 3.6 yards per play. But after Reed scored with 8:10 left in the game in the third quarter, A&M defeated LSU 31-6, averaging 9.9 yards per play, with Reed running the show.

Reed threw just two passes, went 2-for-2 for 70 yards, including a 54-yarder to Noah Thomas, and ran nine times for 62 yards and three touchdowns.

“It’s obviously an incredible honor for Marcel Reed to be ready to go tonight,” Elko said. “It certainly wasn’t Conner’s fault. There weren’t a lot of open windows. We couldn’t get the passing game going at all. We couldn’t call it good. I couldn’t get them to run it right. We couldn’t get open “It was just a litany of problems. Conner wasn’t pitching well at times. We just felt like we needed a spark and we pulled the trigger and went with Marcel, and what a spark he gave us.”

Weigman said the Aggies’ calls were simple, but often zone-read plays where he read the defender and then went.

“They just crashed, crashed on our running backs,” Reed said. “When they crashed, I pulled the ball and ran. And you see they did it a lot and I had a lot of opportunities to get some space and run and they didn’t really make any adjustments. So that was it.”

The Aggies’ defense turned it on, too, getting to LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier, who went 25-for-50 for 405 yards with two touchdowns but threw three interceptions in the second half. Two of those went to BJ Mayes, a defensive back from Houston who spent his first two seasons at Incarnate Word and last season at UAB and had recently made the move from corner to nickel back.

“It was beautiful, my journey,” Mayes said. “My first time playing nickel in my life. So to come in as quickly as I did, pick up the game and then start a big game, LSU, that was awesome.”

The Aggies’ journey was something, too. They lost their season opener at home 23-13 against Notre Dame, the first major game of the Elko era. This game would be a test of how far they have come since that setback.

“It’s a huge win,” Reed said. “It was LSU, we all had a chip on our shoulder. We didn’t really think they respected us when we walked into Kyle Field. To get that spark in the second half and get the team going, there was no going back from that at all .” .”

Texas A&M has now won seven straight, matching the total from last year’s 7-5 season that led to a $77.6 million buyout of coach Jimbo Fisher, and faces the first time going 5-0 in conference since 1998, when the Aggies emerged victorious. in the Big 12. Elko took over a program that signed the No. 1 class in 2022 and then went 11-11.

“The whole rhetoric about this program was NIL, mercenaries and selfishness and all those things,” Elko said.

But the win over LSU is a validation of Elko’s vision of what Texas A&M can be. His team outscored LSU 242-24, and his defense forced Nussmeier into his first career three-interception game.

“This is a real program,” Elko said. ‘It’s not fake. I am not a politician who runs this program and talks fast and insults everyone.”

Next week, the 7-1 Aggies head to South Carolina to maintain their lead in the SEC race. But Elko wasn’t looking that far ahead.

“The price of success and the price of winning games like that is you have a target on your back,” Elko said. “What 5-0 means is that we will really have a lot of time to get to 6-0.”