Reason to Believe
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 pundits have for us in 2025:
Hmmm ... so maybe not all of those low rankings come from a historically negative bias against State. Sometimes those darn pesky facts can dim hopes and dreams.
But wait ... in this new age of the transfer portal can't we find, as in the words of the Tim Hardin song made popular by Rod Stewart, a "Reason to Believe"?!? Won't we have a different team with an entirely new cast of characters from last year's team? Well, sorta. After last season we had a couple of players who finished their eligibility (which with added eligibility for COVID years, liberalized transfer rules, etc. is pretty damn hard to do!), some left us (including some we'd have preferred to have kept like Coleman, Craver, Blanton, and Pollock), and a whole bunch were "processed." [That term reminds me of a former colleague who was in a sorority at a major college in Texas, who told me about "cut sessions" during recruitment of prospective new members a/k/a rushees. She said they tried not to be cruel with what they said about those whom they clearly had no desire to pledge; instead they would simply say of them, "H.E.W.," which meant "happier elsewhere." In my fraternity when those guys came up, we would less charitably say, "Cull."] So, process = H.E.W. = cull. Following last year's disastrous season, Lebby and staff understandably have energetically tried to, in Biblical terms, "separate the wheat from the chaff."
Of course, the door to the portal swings both ways. We have vigorously mined the transfer portal in search of players who can help us win one or more SEC games. We have found several whom we have presumably rewarded handsomely to sign on as Bulldogs (for at least a season) and hopefully can help us compete on a level with our SEC opponents. Of course, this is something of a crap shoot for us and for all of our competitors who are similarly trying to upgrade rosters. Unless you're a school with benefactors who have lots more money than they need and are willing to give untold fistfuls away to their alma mater or favorite team to buy players through a grossly misnamed process called NIL, you're left casting your line into a pond with all sizes and varieties of fish along with (to use a Lebbyism) tons of other fishermen. Basically there are 2 breeds of these fish: 1) somewhat competent to unproven players on quality teams who for some reason (e.g., not starting or playing as much as one wants, not getting paid as much as one deems himself worth, hurt feelings because the coach talks mean to me, SOB's expect me to go to class and to take -- and pass -- exams, etc.) have leapt into the portal, or 2) proven players who have been successful at smaller schools from Group of 5 to NAIA who still harbor D-I/G4 and💰 dreams.
In addition to the high school and juco recruits the Bulldogs signed, they have added 32 transfers from the portal. The quantity is impressive; the quality ...?? Well, we'll know by around the middle of the season or so. MSU should reasonably expect to get some immediate help from guys like guys like Blake Steens, an experienced offensive lineman from UVA; Jalen Smith, an All-SEC Freshman Team LB from Tennessee; and Brennen Thompson and Anthony Evans, talented receivers with some playing experience from Oklahoma and Georgia, respectively. The 'Dogs also signed transfers from schools like NC State, Auburn, Texas, Texas A&M, Kentucky, Colorado, Purdue, Indiana, Michigan State, and even Ole Miss. They signed Luke Kromenhoek, a former 5-star QB from FSU, who as a true freshman started several games at the end of the season, who will provide depth behind the historically injury-prone Blake Shapen. In addition to those mentioned, State signed a number of experienced players from Group of 5 and D-II schools who may or may not be "ready for prime time." They addressed (at least in terms of number and size) glaring needs on both the offensive and defensive lines. The crying need for cornerbacks? Not so much, which is a worry.
General Outlook for 2025
Let me cut straight to the chase: Barring massive catastrophic injuries I expect our team to be a more talented team than we had last year, but I think there's a real chance that we don't win but 1 or 2 more games than we did in 2024, which you'll recall were a grand total of 2. I'll get into reasons below.
Honestly this is the most pessimistic I ever remember being about the prospects for a Bulldog team before a season began. Granted, I've long donned maroon-tinted lenses. I've ridden the see-saw as coaches have come and gone. The first year I began following Miss. State football (1957), they went 6-2-1 and had lofty expectations the following year, but instead began a downward spiral. That first State coach whose name I knew, Wade Walker, began a trend of having a lone winning season during his tenure, a path followed by Davis, Shira, Felker, and Croom. Some improvement was made when Tyler managed 3 winning seasons and Bellard 2. Jackie showed that occasional success was possible and finished as MSU's all-time winningest -- and losingest -- coach. Mullen was very much the outlier, showing us winning could happen at State with 7 winning seasons in 9 years. He was, of course, followed by JoeMo, who squandered a talented roster with 1 ungratifying winning season that could/should have been so much more before returning us to our losing ways. Leach came, and after the wackiness of COVID and massive philosophy changes in a losing first year, seemed to have jolted us back to winning ways before his untimely death ... which also seems possibly the death of competitive Bulldog football for an uncomfortable period of time. Let's call it a coma.
So have I gone over to the SOS (Same Old State) side and thrown in with the Legion of Pessimism? No, I think instead I have been beaten into submission into realism. During my younger days I could always find reasons to be optimistic that (to borrow a phrase from legendary Mississippi singer Sam Cooke) "a change is gonna come." That could take the form of a new coach about whom we fans (and occasionally "outside experts") expected eventual success, the recruiting of some highly regarded high school and/or juco players (originally blue chippers and more recently 4 and 5 stars), but mostly because we thought the world was fair and it was just "our turn" ... law of averages and such. There's no escaping the painful truth that the spectre of The Ghost of Dreadful Seasons Past has loomed over us Baby Boomer fans of MSU. In fact, when considering a title for the blog for this season, I chose to pay homage to the sad fact that the past has shaped expectations not just for the SOS crowd, but for any State fan who has been awake since the 50's by using the title of an old Lou Rawls album from 1969, The Way It Was, The Way It Is.
No, my low expectations for the coming season are not because I think that's just our lot in life, although there is, I must admit after 68 years of watching us wobble back to our corner with losing seasons in 39 of those, persistent evidence supporting that premise. I still want to believe we can compete in the SEC; I just don't think we can this year ... and quite likely for some years to come. No one would be more delighted to be wrong than I would be. We're due. Hell, I'm due! For me the bottom line is that I think we can be a better team than we were last season -- maybe a good bit better -- and have no more wins to show for it.
Forget Modern Western World history; here are 3 reasons why:
- We have a still unproven coaching staff. Our young head coach in his second year as the head man anywhere. We have the same defensive coordinator who led a historically bad defense ... indeed, who made Peter Sirmon's unit look, well, almost tolerable.
- We have no reason other than Dusty Springfield logic ("Wishin' and Hopin'") to expect that we have better players. We lost some of our better players from last year, and too many of those who were maybe okay are returning. The players whom we have recruited from the high school, juco, and portal ranks are not highly regarded by the so-called recruiting experts. Plus there's that bothersome detail of not knowing whether some/any of the many transfers we signed can actually compete in the SEC since they weren't stars on other G-4 teams or were stars playing against much lesser competition. 🤞
- The schedule, once again, is formidable with 4 of the 12 teams from last year's College Football Playoffs. The conference teams are the same as those we played last year with the game sites flipped. So the 'Dogs play teams like Arizona State, Tennessee, Texas, Georgia (all of whom were in the Playoffs last year) and Ole Miss (who just missed out) at home. Teams we'd expect to have a shot at beating at home like Arkansas, aTm, Florida, and Mizzou? All road games this year. What about the nonconference games, you ask? We open on the road with USM, who hired a new coach and brought in most of the best of his players from Marshall, where they won their conference last season. Other nonconference games (all at home)? Oh, just Arizona State, who won the Big 12 and played in the CFP, and Northern Illinois, like Toledo last year 😨a middling team from the MAC, who just happened to have beaten Notre Dame on the road. Fortunately there is Alcorn State at home. According to the pundits it's one of the 2 toughest schedule in the land.
 |
| Another facing similarly bad odds |
Comments
Post a Comment