STARKVILLE – In six days, the feeding tube will be pulled on the 2016 Mississippi State season, all efforts to revive the patient having been exhausted here at Davis Wade Stadium where Mississippi State fell to Arkansas 58-42 on Saturday, ending the Bulldogs faint bowl hopes and ensuring their first losing season in seven years.
Cause of death: Defensive hemorrhaging.
The Egg Bowl is merely a formality, and prospects for anything but a sad farewell in Oxford are about as likely as Mississippi State’s efforts to stop the Arkansas offense on Saturday.
Those who avoided attending, watching or listening to the game, might consider the 58 points surrendered by the Bulldogs to be sufficient to describe the carnage.
On its second possession of the game, Arkansas drove 63 yards but missed a 39-yard field goal.
That is significant because it was the only time Arkansas didn’t score on its first 10 possessions. Arkansas didn’t score on its 11th — and last — possession, solely because the clock expired with the Razorbacks on the Bulldogs 24.
If the Arkansas punter had missed the bus to the airport in Fayetteville, no one would have ever noticed.
This was not one of those grind-you-into-submission onslaughts, either. Arkansas ran 67 plays, of which 13 went for 20 yards or more, including touchdown runs of 72, 42 and 33 yards. Razorback tailback Rawleigh Williams III alone had 205 rushing yards on just 16 carries. Arkansas averaged a ridiculous 9.8 yards per play.
It was, in a word, laughable. In another word, embarrassing.
All that’s left now is for Ole Miss to shovel the dirt on the corpse and look ahead, if you dare, to next season.
Coming into the season, whatever optimism reasonable MSU fans may have had was of the guarded variety. In the post-Dak Prescott world, most folks figured the offense would be a work in progress. Maybe the defense, with what promised to be a deep and talented front seven, would carry the Bulldogs until the offense jelled under sophomore quarterback Nick Fitzgerald.
That didn’t happen. In fact, it didn’t come close to happening. With only the rarest of exception, the MSU defense was a sieve. While the offense did improve as the season progressed, the defense seemed to regress. In the last two games, MSU gave up 109 points and 1,276 yards.
For the season, MSU’s defense has surrendered an average of 455 yards and 34.2 points per game.
No one could have ever imagined it would have turned out like this.
In a week’s time, Dan Mullen will have completed his eighth season as the Bulldogs’ coach. Over that span, which includes a school record six consecutive bowl trips and just two losing seasons, the Bulldogs have consistently fielded a credible, sometimes prolific, offense. This year has proven no different. By mid-season, the Bulldogs were again playing well enough on offense to win on most Saturdays. State is averaging a shade under 30 points per game. That should be enough most of the time. Yet, State is now 4-7. You see the issue. It ain’t offense.
And that’s almost always been the case with State under Mullen. The Bulldogs go as far as their defense allows them to go.
And this year, the defense has carried the Bulldogs to an inglorious end, with one final humiliation remaining.
In eight seasons, Mullen has had five defensive coordinators. It’s hard to imagine there won’t be a sixth by the time the Bulldogs take the field next fall.
In his first season as defensive coordinator, Pete Sirmon has done nothing to inspire confidence. Saturday’s game was as much of an indictment as should be required.
“It’s not one thing,” Mullen said. “Missed tackles. Poor execution. Being out of position. When you give up that many points, it’s not one thing. It’s several different things.”
Lost in the Bulldogs’ ineptitude is the progress of Fitzgerald, who has been an absolute warrior — a player who has made big stride in his first season.
Fitzgerald accounted for six touchdowns — four rushing and two passing — and piled up 459 total yards, yet he was a mere footnote in the game.
That alone tells you just how bad the Bulldogs’ defense was on Saturday.
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