STARKVILLE — December football delivered Saturday.
In a game that was postponed from Dec. 5 to just days before Christmas, head coach Mike Leach and Mississippi State sent fans home for the holidays with a 51-32 win over Missouri in the Bulldogs’ most complete contest since September. But Saturday wasn’t your usual, tight-bowed, gift-wrapped victory. Rather it was marred by the too-much eggnog kind of follies that send family members to sleep in a leatherbound recliner instead of their own bed.
Depleted and downtrodden from a 3-7 season that has seen far more negative ebbs than positive flows, MSU lost its best tackler in senior linebacker Erroll Thompson on a targeting call on the second play of the game, allowed a surgical 10-play, 75 yard touchdown drive on the opening possession and fired four incompletions on its first five offensive plays. Yet after a muffed punt, a long snapper touchdown and a seamless aerial attack that, for the first time in months, actually mimicked the offense Leach has been lauded for over his nearly two-decade head coaching career, the Bulldogs capped off an at-times doomed regular season with an emphatic thumping of the visiting Tigers.
“I would have to say the thing I was most impressed with, I thought we competed hard throughout,” Leach said. “And when you compete hard you can overcome some of the bonehead stuff and then some of the basic execution stuff becomes more explosive.”
Until Saturday, the lone ornament worth hanging on MSU’s 2020 Christmas tree was a 44-34 win over LSU in Baton Rouge that, in hindsight, garnered more national attention than merited. But Saturday, Leach and the Bulldogs took a flamethrower to that aforementioned timber as it torched Missouri for an offensive display lost for much of this fall.
Despite allowing an all-too easy opening drive touchdown, the Bulldogs barked back to the tune of 27 first half points — MSU’s most in an opening 30 minutes all season and more points than they scored in eight of its nine games entering Saturday.
“We improved a lot throughout the week,” freshman running back Jo’quavious Marks, who helped MSU to a season-high 151 rush yards, said. “We’ve been at a high tempo in practice, so it led over to the game.”
Paul Blackwell, a 5-foot-10 long snapper who spent two years at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, notched MSU’s first score of the afternoon after Missouri’s Cade Musser bobbled a punt that tumbled into the Tiger end zone to add another unusual slot to the 2020 Bingo board.
With renewed life following Blackwell’s score, Rogers sliced and diced a Missouri pass defense that ranked fifth in the Southeastern Conference entering the contest and consistently mixed in a befuddling amount of man coverage against an offense that thrives in one-on-one situations. After missing on his first four throws, the freshman quarterback completed 13 of the next 19 throws, twice hitting on six consecutively.
As Rogers progressively found a rhythm, freshman receiver Jaden Walley again proved to be the windy gusts carrying MSU’s offensive sail. Walley, a converted quarterback who broke Mardye McDole’s freshman single-season receiving record against Auburn, became the first Bulldog pass catcher to record four straight 100 yard games since Fred Ross in 2015 as he dashed and darted through the Missouri defense en route to 129 yards on five receptions.
While MSU lit up the scoreboard brighter than the Griswold residence on Christmas Eve Saturday, it wasn’t without its faults. Rogers notched two second half turnovers that briefly brought Missouri within two scores and a chance to pull within eight after he undershot Walley in the back right corner of the end zone to give the Tigers a momentary shot at life.
But for all the inconsistencies of this season, defensive coordinator Zach Arnett’s stalwart unit slammed the door shut as Collin Duncan wrestled a Connor Bazelak pass away from a Missouri receiver for one of MSU’s three interceptions of the day.
“Ever since midway through the season we’ve been trying to make a bigger emphasis on ‘Let’s go after the ball; when the ball is in the air there’s no more 50/50 balls’.” Duncan said. “We’ve got to go make plays for our team and make sure we keep the momentum on our side.”
Change was inevitable in Starkville this fall. Mike Leach took over a program that had spent the better part of the past three decades in run-centric offenses, replacing it with a system that saw its signal-caller finish second in the nation in passing the past two seasons. Growing pains were a given, falling off a 10,000 foot cliff and looking utterly inept for most of its first nine games was not.
Saturday, MSU looked like the kind of team Leach sold upon his arrival. The Bulldogs were dynamic on offense and stifling on defense. They were undermanned, but never outgunned. They hammered home knockout punch after knockout punch when faced with adversity. For the first time since that early fall afternoon in Baton Rouge, MSU was the better team all day long, jingling cowbells and all.
Ben Portnoy reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @bportnoy15.
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