The Way It Was, The Way It Is

 START US UP! Okay, Mick and Keith, kick it! [ click here   Start Me Up  ] If you read the initial blog entry, you're probably asking, "What the hell?!? You were all down on the 'Dogs this football season. Now Start Me Up ?!?" Fair questions. Part of me is like, "Come on, let's get this season over with."  But, like many of you have probably done, I've been reading Dawgs Bite  and Six Pack Speak , listening to MSU podcasters, and feeling a little tingly with the local buzz as State students have returned to Starkvegas for the start of fall semester. Plus for most of my life at this time of the year I've been getting fired up for the start of football season. It began in my early years before I'd ever heard of Miss. State as a dedicated fan of the hometown Jones County Jr. College Bobcats, who had spoiled me by winning the MS Jr. College state championship and going to the Jr. Rose Bowl in Pasadena when I was in the 2nd grade. (They introduce...

  REASON TO BELIEVE Futility of the Flying M This past week the 2025 Mississippi State Bulldogs reported for fall camp, and the coaches and media who cover the team all began looking for causes for optimism. So have we 'Dog fans, particularly those of us of the DOS (Dear Ole State) variety who are perpetually hoping for the long-awaited arrival of the "Next Year." Of course, the SEC and national media have already weighed in, universally predicting us dead last in the SEC. That's no shock; they almost always pick State last in preseason polls, and they've usually been wrong ... sometimes badly wrong. But not last year. They said we'd suck, and suck we did. But this year? We have a few players back from the team that won only twice, lost every SEC game, and was hammered at home by mighty Toledo. Let's take at look at MSU's conference rankings in team stats from last year and see if we might discover some rational basis for the low expectations the pundi...