Thursday should have been reason for celebration.
After an up and down regular season coupled with the hellish conditions 2020 presented society by way of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mississippi State’s 28-26 win over No. 24 Tulsa was a chance to look toward the future in a game that salvaged an, at times, forgettable season.
But rather than confetti and field celebrations, Thursday’s win was less about the on-field product as it was the benches clearing brawl after the fact.
“I’m not going to comment a whole lot about it,” Tulsa head coach Phillip Montgomery added. “The one thing I’ll say is our program, our guys, we’re a team that’s going to stand up for each other and we’re going to battle. We talk about faith, family, football. Family’s going to take care of family. We’re a team that has battled all year long. We battled again today. From that standpoint our guys are going to continue to protect each other.”
Speaking with reporters postgame, neither Leach nor any of the MSU players queried about the brawl had an explanation as to why the fight began, but as videos of the brawl spread across the internet like wildfire, the postgame skirmish dominated the conversation.
Not the first incident in a chippy game, Thursday’s contest began with what Leach referenced as a number of Tulsa players circling around his guys during pregame warmups. Players barked back and forth at one another before assistant coaches separated the teams. Tulsa also earned three unsportsmanlike penalties in the first half alone, while MSU added another in the third quarter.
MSU receiver Malik Heath, who was visibly seen kicking a Tulsa player on the ground during the postgame fight, and Starkville native Kameron Jones were pulled away from a slew of Tulsa players during a brief trading of jabs in the second quarter as both teams argued who jumped first on a snap.
“It didn’t mar anything we did out there whatsoever,” MSU head coach Mike Leach said postgame. “It is done. The root of it is dumb no matter what the root of it was. The continuation of it was dumb. I would have it solidly in the category of dumb. Where the dumb started I am not entirely sure.”
The fight seemed to begin when MSU linebacker Aaron Brule got into a brief spat with a handful of Tulsa players along the sideline. Brule was then pushed to the ground and mayhem commenced.
Heath was also seen throwing Tulsa safety TieNeal Martin to the ground, kicking him in the facemask and then sprinting away down the field. After the game, an Instagram video of Heath surfaced in which he was celebrating kicking Martin in the face.
“Yo come here (expletive),” Heath said as he watched the video on a cell phone with teammates. “Get your little ass down. Watch how I slammed him…Watch how I slammed him. I go hard.”
Thursday isn’t the first time Heath has been in hot water since he arrived at MSU as the nation’s No. 9-ranked junior college player in the class of 2020. The former Callaway High School and Copiah-Lincoln Community College star was arrested in August and charged with a DUI, speeding, improper equipment, no proof of insurance and not having a license before being released on $3,000 bond.
“I haven’t seen enough film to let us off the hook on this thing by any stretch,” Leach said when asked what happened. “We haven’t had any trouble of that sort of thing all season. We haven’t had any trouble with that. I don’t know if they had or not and I don’t know where the basis of that was.”
Leach also noted during his postgame press conference it remained to be seen what kind of discipline would be doled out, should there be any.
Thursday, MSU took a step forward in reviving a season that looked lost for months on end. But rather than enjoy the celebrations that come with a bowl victory, the postgame fight offered an ugly close for a team that quite literally slugged its way to the first bowl win of Leach’s tenure.
“Obviously I hate that to take away from the win we had, winning our first bowl game in a couple years — that’s big,” junior receiver Austin Williams said. “I hate that negative publicity for the team. I thought we played really hard today.”
Ben Portnoy reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @bportnoy15.
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