STARKVILLE — Mississippi State women’s basketball made history Monday, albeit not in a way it’d hope to repeat.
Nearly seven years and 125 weeks since the Bulldogs last failed to appear in the Associated Press Top 25, MSU was dropped from the poll for the first time since the second week of the 2014-15 season.
But as national acclaim for a Bulldog program that had risen above mediocre seasons and middling play over the past decade continues to fade, MSU’s youth and inexperience continues to plague head coach Nikki McCray-Penson’s squad in ways that parallel both past and present.
The Bulldogs are currently relying on a roster comprised of three freshmen, three sophomores, four juniors, a senior and a graduate transfer. Differently put, half of MSU’s current squad has played less than two years of college basketball, while three of its upperclassmen (Xaria Wiggins, Sidney Cooks and Yemiyah Morris) have never averaged more than 19.4 minutes per game at the Division I level.
Take then, the Bulldogs’ 2013-14 roster, one that finished Vic Schaefer’s second season in Starkville 22-14 and reached the quarterfinals of the WNIT. Of MSU’s 12 players that winter, five were freshmen or sophomores and two of its four returning juniors played less than 15 minutes per game. Sound familiar?
“We’re still finding our way,” McCray-Penson said after MSU was dismantled by No. 1 South Carolina two weeks ago. “And I do believe our best basketball is going to be played in February.”
In a year in which COVID-19 limited offseason practice times and, most important, new staffs’ ability mold their rosters into the shape needed for first year success, older teams have proved the class of college basketball.
On the men’s side, usual blue-bloods like Kentucky, Duke, Kansas and Michigan State have struggled mightily with rosters heavily comprised of underclassmen and blue-chip recruits. According to KenPom.com’s experience rankings, all four programs rank 196 or worse of men’s college basketball’s 357 teams. Duke and Kentucky, who have combined for a 12-19 record this winter, rank No. 341 and No. 346 nationally.
Though no such metrics exist on the women’s side, the youth argument is a key cog in understanding the 2021 Bulldogs. MSU currently sits eighth in the SEC standings with a 3-4 record. Of the teams sitting in the conference’s top four — South Carolina, Texas A&M, Tennessee and Kentucky — all four brought back at least four players that averaged 15-plus minutes per game a season ago. MSU, by contrast, has just three such players.
Throughout the 2020-21 campaign, Nikki McCray-Penson has harped on MSU’s youth and inexperience. While she inherited a team that was ranked among the nation’s elite in preseason polls, no player outside of sophomore Rickea Jackson, and juniors Jessika Carter and Myah Taylor started more than three games a season ago.
More recently, Jackson, who herself is in just her second collegiate season, hasn’t looked herself on the floor. Twice McCray-Penson benched her to start games over MSU’s past three contests. Jackson has also averaged just 12.5 points in her past four games, well below the 17.2 points per night she had recorded to that point.
“For Rickea it’s being a threat when she steps off the bus,” McCray-Penson said in September of what had to improve in Jackson’s game this winter. That means she’s got to be able to shoot this basketball first and foremost and then we play off of that. Rickea has been an inside out player and now she has to be an outside-in player from the get-go. From the time she steps off the bus, she has to be a threat.”
Youth and once-in-a-generation pandemic aside, a new-look coaching staff also generally proves a transition in itself. In three years at Old Dominion, McCray-Penson’s squad took its lumps. The Monarchs finished their first season under McCray-Penson 8-23 before vaulting to a 21-win second campaign. Her third season in Virginia saw Old Dominion conclude the COVID-19 shortened campaign at 24-6.
Schaefer’s first three seasons at MSU, by contrast, almost mirrored McCray-Penson’s Old Dominion teams. The Bulldogs finished his first year in Starkville 13-17 and 5-11 in SEC play, before the aforementioned 2013-14 WNIT quarterfinal appearance a year later. After his second season, Schaefer’s teams never won less than 27 games the rest of his tenure.
Over the past three weeks a handful of McCray-Penson’s SEC compatriots have come to her defense. Texas A&M coach Gary Blair, who noted MSU didn’t look as it had in previous years, was quick to share his belief that the Bulldogs’ first-year head coach would right the ship. Staley, who McCray-Penson worked for in her first decade at South Carolina, went a step further.
“They have some great players,” Staley said after the Gamecocks’ Jan. 28 dismantling of MSU. “They haven’t gotten it all together, but come another month, Nikki will have them going.”
Expectations have changed since Schaefer took over a perennial SEC-bottom feeder in 2012, but given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and youth that continues to plague the Bulldogs, MSU’s dropping out of the top 25 Monday is the latest reminder that McCray-Penson’s vision, whatever that may be, remains a work in progress.
“We’re winners,” McCray-Penson said after the South Carolina loss. “And we have to get back to our winning ways.”
Ben Portnoy reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @bportnoy15.
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