John Cohen can see it every day at practice.

The Mississippi State athletic director has watched the Bulldogs’ improvement daily. How they’ve gotten more and more comfortable with each other and with the coaching staff. How they’ve excelled on the field despite detailed, rigorous practices.

“These kids are getting better,” Cohen said.

It’s an understandable assessment given Mississippi State’s significant midseason improvement. With just one game to go — the Liberty Bowl against Texas Tech on Dec. 28 — Cohen thinks the Bulldogs are set up for even more success in 2022.

He’s not the only one.

“We’re on the upswing,” head coach Mike Leach said.

Mississippi State (7-5, 4-4 Southeastern Conference) closed its regular season by winning four of its final six games, including victories over Kentucky and Auburn. The Bulldogs also posted wins over Texas A&M and North Carolina State; all four opponents spent time in the top 25.

MSU will rue missed opportunities against conference foes such as Arkansas and Ole Miss but entrenched itself as a capable player in the SEC West, finishing fourth in the division.

Cohen pointed out the Bulldogs’ record could have been much better than 7-5 in any other alignment.

“The SEC West is the best division of the best conference in the entire country,” he said. “You can be a very, very good football team and not have the win-loss numbers that you want to have. I think everybody in our league at one point has gone through that in the SEC West.”

Now, the Bulldogs will face a Big 12 team for the first time since losing to Kansas State on Sept. 14, 2019. The Red Raiders (6-6, 3-6 Big 12) will meet them in Memphis at 5:45 p.m. Dec. 28.

With a victory, Mississippi State can win a second straight bowl game and finish with eight wins for the first time since 2018 under Joe Moorhead.

“I think it always brings quite a bit of momentum to the offseason,” Leach said. “Like all teams, I think it’s really important, and I do think that it helps energize the offseason.”

The former Texas Tech and Washington State head coach evened his bowl record at 8-8 after beating a ranked Tulsa team 28-26 in last season’s Armed Forces Bowl.

The game marked Mississippi State’s 11th consecutive bowl appearance. This year’s Liberty Bowl will be the 12th.

“It’s a sign of the continuity in your athletic department and then obviously in your program,” defensive coordinator Zach Arnett said. “This place has been to 12 straight bowl games because it’s got really good football players in the program.”

Regardless of the Bulldogs’ Liberty Bowl result, Arnett acknowledged the bowl streak is a key selling point when it comes to recruiting.

“When you have something like that to recruit off of, and you can show recruits that bowl games are the expectation, and the program’s done it 12 years in a row, and that is the standard the players have set coming before them, that makes it really easy to recruit to because recruits can see all the nice things that come along with bowl play every year,” Arnett said.

What not everyone sees, Arnett said, are the struggles that went into the season, the growing pains that a young team went through.

The Bulldogs needed a 20-point comeback to beat Louisiana Tech in their season opener and lost at Memphis, a middling American Athletic Conference team. They started the year just 2-2 after a loss the following week to LSU.

But then?

“Sometimes failure is the best learning experience you can have,” Arnett said. “We kind of hit our stride.”

The Bulldogs won five of their final eight games. They went on the road to knock off A&M, then once again beat Kentucky in Starkville. They rallied from 25 points down to beat Auburn inside Jordan-Hare Stadium.

The next step? Don’t get behind 28-3 in the first place, of course.

“We’ve got to still get consistent,” Leach said. “We’ve got to become a more mature, polished team. But I think we’re getting there. We’re getting there. We’re heading in the right direction. We’re certainly not there yet.”

But Cohen thinks the Bulldogs are close. He said MSU is a “very good football team without a lot of experience.”

By 2022, that should change. And the Liberty Bowl can be another step along the way.

“I think we have the opportunity to have one of the elite offenses in the entire country, and I think our defense speaks for itself,” Cohen said. “I think once this team has the experience that we need, we have a chance to be a very, very good football team in ’22, but we have a bowl in front of us, and we’d love to take that next step in this bowl game as well.”

Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.