It was supposed to be the biggest football weekend of the season at Mississippi State. A Friday night concert set the stage for MSU’s game Saturday against Auburn.
Talk about your lost weekends, huh?
First, concert headliner Flo Rida was a no-show after he missed his flight from San Francisco for the Bulldog Bash on Friday.
On Saturday, pretty much the whole MSU team was a no-show in a different Bulldog Bash, as Auburn rolled to a laughably easy 35-0 halftime lead and cruised to a 38-14 victory. It was MSU’s worst loss in 50 games. More beat-downs seem all but inevitable.
An overreaction? Possibly. Things aren’t always as bad as they first seem. Sometimes they are worse.
Some games are lost on breaks, the ability or
inability to make a key play as a key juncture, or one player having a transcendent performance.
This wasn’t one of those games.
MSU was whipped, and whipped badly, up front on both sides of the ball. In all phases, Auburn didn’t merely win; it dominated.
“The whole game starts up front,” MSU coach Dan Mullen coolly observed. “You’re not going to win many football games when you don’t win the line of scrimmage.”
Auburn’s dominance pretty much sucked all of the life out of an announced crowd of 60,102 at Davis Wade Stadium. It also sucked the suspense out of the remainder of MSU’s season.
MSU hit the halfway mark of the season with a 2-4 record (1-2 in the Southeastern Conference) and few prospects of victory remaining when you consider the hard half of the season awaits.
This has 3-9 written all over it, folks, and serves as a reminder that all teams are fluid from season to season.
Some teams reload. Some rebuild. Some start over.
Coming into the season, MSU fans dismissed the first, hoped for the second, and feared the last.
The Bulldogs are pretty much in start-over mode now and unless Mullen can identify some playmakers, the process may outlast him, incredible as they might have seemed before this season started.
He is in eminent peril, but roll that 3-9 record into next season and, barring a remarkable turnaround in 2017, the seat gets pretty warm.
The casual fan might attribute MSU’s dramatic fall from a school-record six straight bowl games to the departure of Dak Prescott, whose talents covered a multitude of deficiencies. The Bulldogs won before Prescott, too, lest we forget, so MSU is missing more than Prescott.
MSU still has some good players. What it doesn’t have are difference-makers, or at least enough of them to matter.
The rest of the season likely will be a six-week audition to see how many, if any, of the young players can emerge to fill those roles.
Malik Dear, Keith Mixon, Jamal Couch, Nick Fitzgerald, Leo Lewis and, perhaps, Jeffrey Simmons have potential to be good, solid players. If any of these players have star quality, it has yet to be demonstrated.
That is one part of the equation. The other is, as always, recruiting. Until MSU can retain its coaching staff for more than a year or two and create the relationships with top players it so desperately needs, the road will remain difficult.
Maybe that’s getting a little to far out in front, though, since recruiting has no immediate relevance on this season.
Based on what we have seen, it isn’t unfair to question whether the Bulldogs have the players required to win in the SEC, or whether they have the coaching that is required to win.
There is a third possibility, too: The Bulldogs may have neither.
It’s kind of hard to push that possibility of your mind after Saturday.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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