STARKVILLE — Speaking with reporters amid Washington State’s 2-4 start to the 2012 campaign, then-head coach Mike Leach added another historic line to his memorable list of rants.
“Some of them have had this zombie-like, go-through-the-motions,” Leach said of his seniors’ leadership. “That’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it’ll always be.'”
“Some of them quite honestly have an empty-corpse quality,” he continued. “That’s not pleasant to say or pleasant to think about, but that’s a fact.”
Fast forward eight years, and Leach is again in the midst of a muddied 2-4 start in his first year guiding a Mississippi State team that fired incumbent coach Joe Moorhead despite a winning record and 2-0 mark against Ole Miss.
In a place and program that has seen about as little success as any in major college football (take MSU’s 0.490 winning percentage, the eighth-worst mark in Power Five conference football, as an example), the longtime outlaw coach echoed the “zombies” disclaimer following the Bulldogs’ loss to Kentucky on Oct. 10.
“We’re going to have to check some of our group and see who really wants to play here, because any malcontents, we’re going to have to purge a couple of those,” Leach said.
Coming purges aside — though MSU has already seen eight players leave the program for varying reasons over the past three weeks — the parallels between Leach’s first season in Pullman and this year in Starkville are eerily similar.
With the promise of a high-flying aerial assault that would take the Southeastern Conference by storm, the Bulldogs looked well on their way to making significant noise in 2020 after downing then-No. 6 LSU on an afternoon the Tigers honored the 2019 national title team in the season opener. Former Stanford quarterback K.J. Costello rather loudly announced himself to the Deep South that day courtesy of a conference record 623-yard outing as the Bulldogs won 44-34 in a game that wasn’t as close as the score indicated.
But in the weeks since, the MSU offense has shifted from dynamic to middling to downright anemic. In MSU’s five games after the win over LSU, the Bulldogs have failed to reach the 300 passing yard plateau four times, scored 14 points or less four times, were held without an offensive score twice and were completely shut out by then-No. 2 Alabama on Halloween, marking the first time in Leach’s 19-year head coaching his team failed to score a single point.
It’s here where the parallels begin.
During Leach’s inaugural season in Pullman, he and his staff inherited a program that had bottomed out under Paul Wulff, notching a record of just 9-40 over his four seasons. Finishing the year 3-9 in 2012, the Cougars were held to less than 300 yards passing four times and mustered seven points or less on four separate occasions.
Similarly frustrating, Washington State concluded the season with just 349 yards on the ground total and finished four games with negative rushing yards.
Sound familiar?
There’s also the matter of the offensive line play. Historically lauded for the wide splits the air raid employs, the spacing Leach asks of his offensive line is a far cry from the tight splits employed in Moorhead’s RPO-based attack.
Transitioning from being on top of one another to seemingly miles apart, the MSU offensive line has seen its Pro Football Focus run blocking grade drop from 67.2 to 48.9 (No. 110 nationally) on a 100-point scale, while its pass blocking grade dipped from 62.7 to 44.1 (No. 115 nationally).
Washington State’s 2012 offensive line endured similar growing pains. After allowing 38 sacks during Wulff’s final year in Pullman, the Cougars finished dead last in the country by allowing 57 sacks — 4.75 per game — during Leach’s first season, including a 10-sack outing against Stanford.
“At first it was ‘He’s going to go how far out?'” offensive line coach Mason Miller, who spent two years with Leach at Washington State, said in August. “Now it’s kind of turned into they’re stepping on each other, which means they’re moving their feet. If you’re stepping on each other with three-and-a-half foot splits we’re covering some ground there.”
Entering 2020, MSU returned just 12 starters and boasted 26 underclassmen on the inaugural two-deep. By contrast, Washington State headed into 2012 with just 13 returning starters — a stat Leach maligned when asked of his memories of that year on Wednesday.
Having not been afforded spring practices amid a pandemic, coupled with a conference-only schedule bereft of the usual nonconference cupcakes the Bulldogs tend to rack up three or four wins per year on, it’s fair to assume MSU could finish this season 2-8. And while the optics of such a conclusion to Leach’s first year in Starkville may make fans quiver at the thought, Washington State’s 6-7 rebound in Year 2 should offer a semblance of optimism whether Leach adds to his growing list of famed rants or not.
“We’re definitely in the training wheels stage,” he said following MSU’s slim win over Vanderbilt last week. “But suffice it to say it’s going to get a little bit more aggressive than that.”
Ben Portnoy reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @bportnoy15.
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