STARKVILLE — Once again, Dan Mullen was talking about the rope.
Mississippi State’s football coach has taken to using a rope as both a training mechanism and metaphorical device. A player grabs a rope and fights against some strong force trying to pull the rope out of his grasp; it’s an exercise of strength, sure, but it means more than that.
The rope represents games as they move into the later stages: much like a player has to fight with 100 percent effort to hold onto the rope, they have to show the same fight to hold onto a lead.
The rope got a little slippery Saturday.
That’s where Mullen’s mind went as BYU intercepted MSU in the red zone and returned it 38 yards; it stayed in his mind as two MSU penalties moved BYU 27 yards away from the end zone that was bridged in one play with a touchdown pass. Barely a minute later, BYU quarterback Tanner Mangum floated another pass to the end zone that could play a large part in unraveling MSU’s 45 minutes of winning football that preceded it.
MSU safety Brandon Bryant grabbed the ball — and the rope.
Bryant’s interception early in the fourth quarter thwarted all BYU (1-6) momentum and, as he said it, effectively ended the game. It was the second forced turnover needed to cap what was a dominant defensive showing in most other facets as MSU (4-2) beat the Cougars 35-10.
As Bryant’s hands met the ball, he wasn’t thinking of the game he had effectively just clinched.
“I was thinking (fellow safety) J.T. (Gray) was going to come block for me,” Bryant said while cracking a smile, “but it is what it is.”
Bryant’s interception carried more meaning than the game it sealed. It plugged the one hole the MSU defense had Saturday.
MSU had rendered everything else BYU tried ineffective — even when MSU didn’t see it coming. Most of BYU’s passing attack in the first half was based on screens and passes no more than five yards downfield. Mullen said BYU had not shown that much affinity for screens in its previous games, but it didn’t completely shock anyone.
“Their quarterback is banged up, so it probably helped them early in the game to get the ball out of his hands and mix it up to keep us off-balance,” Mullen said. “I thought our players did a really nice job of adjusting to that defensively.”
Bryant added, “It’s nothing that we haven’t seen all year: Auburn did the same thing, a lot of teams did the same, so we knew they were going to try to copycat some things from those teams that could beat us.”
The fix was simple. As Bryant put it, “We’re fast, physical and aggressive. When we see the ball, we go hit the ball.”
As MSU slowly took away any success from the screen game, it did so while never releasing a stranglehold of the BYU run game: the Cougars finished with 29 rushing yards on 17 carries. It turned out BYU’s interception returns may have been its best offense: it returned two interceptions for a total of 105 yards, both times taking MSU scoring changes and turning them into possessions starting in MSU territory.
All that was left for BYU to go downfield. It only did so three times, but hit MSU on the first two for 43 and 27 yards. The 43-yard pass set up a field goal; the 27-yard strike scored BYU’s lone touchdown.
Each time as MSU came back to the sideline, defensive coordinator Todd Grantham returned to one of his common sayings: sudden change. Grantham says good defense is based on sudden change, both adjusting to adapting offense midgame and rebounding from adversity.
Bryant created the change by intercepting the third one.
Just like that, MSU regained control of the rope. Right off of Bryant’s interception, the MSU offense pieced together a 12-play, 70-yard touchdown drive that took up 6 minutes, 35 seconds of the clock. By then, all was secure: MSU used bench players from that point on.
Moments like that are why Mullen goes back to the rope.
“Every single one of our guys will tell you, that’s something they hear a lot: don’t let go of the rope. They might here an extra adjective between ‘the’ and ‘rope’ that they occasionally here from me,” Mullen said.
“They clasped. They grabbed it and pulled it right back.”
Follow Dispatch sports writer Brett Hudson on Twitter, @Brett_Hudson
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