Even before the season began, the seven Southeastern Conference Western Division coaches talked about the incredible balance in the best division in the nation’s best conference.
Week in and week out, you hear it from winning coaches and losing coaches. So what is the difference between the team at the top of the SEC West and the team at the bottom?
On Saturday, the difference was seven points and turnover on what was, essentially, the game’s final play.
Top-ranked Mississippi State improved to 8-0 and 5-0 in the SEC thanks to a 17-10 victory against Arkansas (4-5, 0-5).
If Bulldog fans thought MSU escaped last week in a 14-point win at Kentucky, the Bulldogs dodged a firing range of bullets Saturday.
Welcome to the Bulldogs’ world, where winning the SEC West might be more difficult than winning the national championship.
Let’s get something squared away once and for all. There are no bad wins, not in the SEC West. You win and you move on. It won’t get any easier, either, not with a trip to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to meet No. 3 Alabama in two weeks and a trip to Oxford to take on No. 7 Ole Miss for what figures to be an epic Egg Bowl on the last Saturday in November.
It’s funny how it goes, though. MSU is well on its way to its most successful season in school history, yet there are grumblings from the fans.
You can start with turnovers. MSU makes too many of them.
For the second time this season, the Bulldog had three turnovers in the first half, two on interceptions by Dak Prescott. The fashionable choice for the Heisman Trophy, Prescott may be carrying the Bulldogs on his broad shoulders, but he has been uncharacteristically turnover prone. He has thrown five interceptions in his past three games after throwing only two in the first five.
That said, the Bulldogs will go only as far as their junior quarterback will take them. Even with the turnovers, he was the catalyst of the offense yet again, throwing for a career-high 331 yards and the winning score, a 69-yard toss to Fred Ross early in the fourth quarter.
MSU coach Dan Mullen knows all this.
“I thought both (interceptions) were kind of poor decisions with the ball more than poor throws,” Mullen said. “But, you know, here’s the thing: Those kinds of things don’t shake him. We’re not going to shy away from taking our shots downfield. We expect him to make plays and he expects to make plays, too.”
Then there is the maddening state of the Bulldogs’ defense, which always seems to be at its worst when the odds are in its favor.
With it is forced to make a play, the MSU defense is a terror. It leads the conference in red zone defense. The Bulldogs did it again Saturday with a goal-line stand deep in the fourth quarter, a stand all the more impressive because it was made against Arkansas’ monstrous running game.
There’s another aspect to the Bulldogs’ defense. Put an offense in a desperate spot and somehow the ball eludes the Bulldogs, often in mysterious fashions.
Such was the case on Arkansas’s final possession. The Razorbacks converted a fourth-and-15 with a 36-yard completion to midfield and a third-and-10 to the Bulldogs’ 16 before Will Redmond ended the fans’ misery with an interception on a fade route in the end zone with 15 seconds left.
It’s never easy. On Saturday, the difference between the best and the worst was seven points.
The Bulldogs may be unbeaten, but the margin for error barely exists the rest of the way.
Keep your chin-strap buckled, as the saying goes.
Slim Smith’s email address is [email protected]
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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