Pondering our current football status (Long, sorry)

Until something happens to bama and I don't know what it is, there is already complacency that there is no hope to most of the West teams to win the West or an East team to win the SEC. Heck, little hope for the vast majority to win a natty due to bama. Today in church I asked a good guy, but a hardcore bama fan (live on bama line) if it was not getting boring to watch their one-sided blowout wins and were they even interested to the final four playoffs? His reply? "Haters gonna hate". They are not even happy in their situation, they want us to love them and embrace their success as they have ruined all competition in the SEC West, SEC, and even the national title playoffs. Most everyone else is an also ran before, during, and at the end of the season. We will always lose top rated Mississippi players to them in this situation. If I knew how to change this, I would be a football genius and it has dampened my overall interest in college football, even as a 40 plus year season ticket holder.

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Originally Posted by HoopsDawg

well, here's an anonymous SEC coach quote from athlon's:

"They’re kind of boring schematically when you really watch them and break them down. They don’t do a whole lot that concerns you. Mullen does a good job — it’s just not particularly creative. You’d play (Steve) Spurrier back in the day and he’d see something he’d like in the NFL on Sunday and you’d see it with him the following weekend. With Mullen, he kind of has his things he likes and that’s what he does. There’s no newness there."

"They’re always just OK up front. They’re going to be physical, and that’s been their M.O. since he’s been there, but they’re not super talented."

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There?s no way sec HCs give those quotes in Athlon. If they didn?t just make up the quotes, the ?coaches? are about the level of brother Patterson at OM.

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Originally Posted by msstate7

There?s no way sec HCs give those quotes in Athlon. If they didn?t just make up the quotes, the ?coaches? are about the level of brother Patterson at OM.

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It's probably an assistant coach. Doesn't make it any less true.

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Originally Posted by msstate7

There?s no way sec HCs give those quotes in Athlon. If they didn?t just make up the quotes, the ?coaches? are about the level of brother Patterson at OM.

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I agree, I've always had a very hard time believing some of those quotes are things actual coaches would say to a media member, no matter what the circumstances. Just not worth the embarrassment if they decided one year to out you.

Nick Fitzgerald became only the 2nd QB in MSU history to have 25 rushing tds and 25 passing tds yesterday and not one single other poster has mentioned this besides myself. If you go back and look at the game thread only Bruns and a small few others aren't ripping Fitz a new one in the thread. My oh my has the perception of our program changed since Croom. C34 spent years telling everyone MSU could never hope to ever have the same talent as LSU or compete equally with LSU. Then he's on here last night defending that he never said LSU had less talent than MSU this year but that it was equal. This is what's wrong with our program right now. We aren't good enough to win like Bama, Auburn, Georgia this year yet we aren't happy to be winning like LSU, aTm and Florida. It took Clemson roughly sixteen straight seasons of slow improvement before they reached playoff/national championship level. We are in year 9 for Mullen. Sit back and try to enjoy the molasses climb it takes to get to where we all want to be ultimately. All the bitching and complaining doesn't make it happen any faster and if you try to cut corners you get ****ed in the ass like Ole Miss currently is not enjoying.

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Originally Posted by HoopsDawg

It's probably an assistant coach. Doesn't make it any less true.

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I take Steve spurrier?s back in the day as when he was at Florida. That?s 2001... you could probably count on your fingers the assistants that?s been in the sec that long

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Originally Posted by thf24

I agree, I've always had a very hard time believing some of those quotes are things actual coaches would say to a media member, no matter what the circumstances. Just not worth the embarrassment if they decided one year to out you.

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Funny that no matter who said it, we've beat their ass. Becaus it didn't come from a bama guy. So there's that.

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Originally Posted by Homedawg

Funny that no matter who said it, we've beat their ass. Becaus it didn't come from a bama guy. So there's that.

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Exactly.

Dans record in the sec against everyone not named bama is 30-28. Thats not to shabby considering what our sec record was in the decade before he arrived.

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Originally Posted by Dawg61

My oh my has the perception of our program changed since Croom. C34 spent years telling everyone MSU could never hope to ever have the same talent as LSU or compete equally with LSU. Then he's on here last night defending that he never said LSU had less talent than MSU this year but that it was equal.

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Nobody expected LSU to drop back into the 20-30 range in talent. But it happened.

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Originally Posted by Commercecomet24

Dans record in the sec against everyone not named bama is 30-28. Thats not to shabby considering what our sec record was in the decade before he arrived.

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That's not bad, but if you take out Bama, I guess you have to take out UK. That's makes him 23-27. Still, that's not horrible.

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Originally Posted by Coach34

Nobody expected LSU to drop back into the 20-30 range in talent. But it happened.

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That would put MSU in the 20-30 range in talent then and every single one of us would have taken that in a heartbeat when Croom got fired. Well we have that right now and we've had that for awhile now. To be great takes a long damn time. It's frustrating how slow it takes. Only thing we can do is fix the holes we see every year and eventually the holes will be smaller and fewer. We've got a pretty good kicker that hasn't missed and our DC is doing well besides two games so we are already better than we were last year. If we have this kicker and Grantham last year we woulda been 9-4 not 6-7.

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Originally Posted by HoopsDawg

That's not bad, but if you take out Bama, I guess you have to take out UK. That's makes him 23-27. Still, that's not horrible.

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UK is our 4th or 5th toughest SEC opponent this year. They don't get taken out.

I think we're doing a lot of things to move this program forward but the bad thing about college is if you made a mistake in recruiting three years ago it's going to bite you down the road and even if you fix it through recruiting and that can be seen on our commitment list- Guidry can't help us at the present. And there's no trade deadline or waiver wire to pick up someone that can help immediately. As long as Dan is addressing the issues, I'm fine with it. Which is why I haven't been nearly as critical of Gonzalez as I have of Hevesy. And I will say that if Hevesy recruits better the criticism will stop there too. I hope the come to Jesus meeting is true as well and it does look like we are recruiting o-line much better than we ever have during Dan's time here.

I think MOST of our problems on our team go back to recruiting. If we had more physical WR's on the outside there is no question we would have been able to move the ball and score more on Georgia and Auburn and would have an even better chance to beat A&M and Alabama. Not being able to move the ball hurts the defense as well because they end up on the field all night and eventually they give way from being pounded on all night and we end up with a blowout. Now we may not have won those games but if we at the very least are competitive and keep it with a 10 point margin I'm fine with that. If we're competitive like that, we're going to win some of those games from time to time. And it's going to help our program because sometimes "looking impressive in a loss" can help with recruiting and things like that.

I think MSU fans are kind of in a weird spot because if you are my age as a child you were told that we would never ever be good in football outside of 1980 and that the only way for us to win was to cheat like Tyler did and then that wouldn't work because we would have to forfeit everything anyway. For a lot of those people just winning the Egg Bowl and going to the Liberty Bowl and winning it was a dream season and I think for a lot of fans that was just simply the goal because that seemed "realistic" and "possible" and a hell of a lot better than 3-8. And I think a lot of our fans resigned themselves to that being "the goal" and making a promise to themselves to never go higher than that if we ever did get to that point. Well, Dan is essentially doing that or better. But to me it seems like we have a lot of fans that are scared to even to move forward beyond that and they come up with all of these excuses why we can't or why we shouldn't..."we might piss off Dan if we tell him to improve something and then he might leave", "we screwed up firing Allyn McKeen 70 years ago...I don't want to do that again". And then we have too many fans and internet personalities I guess that if you make a suggestion that looks even a little bit critical all of a sudden you get attacked and accused of wanting Dan fired, not remembering how bad it was, and asked well, who do you think is better than Dan...for saying that we need better wide receivers or something like you would like to see us do better in big games. It's ridiculous and it's a loser mentality. If you set a goal and you accomplish it and then you don't set a higher goal and you just remain content....you're never going to reach your full potential. That's with anything in life. OK- so we're at the bowl game and winning the Egg Bowl pretty much every year level now...why not go for being a consistent 8-10 win program now? Because you as Joe Fan made a promise to yourself that you would never expect more because you didn't believe it would ever happen in your life 30 years ago? And if we don't get to that level, then so what? At least we did everything we could to be as good as we could be rather than say "Gee I wonder what would have happened if..."

But the thing that a lot of those Joe Fan's need to understand is that the goal of the criticism ISN'T to get Dan fired. It's usually that we want something to be fixed that's very easily correctable. Like Dan upgrading special teams, improving recruiting, playing younger players more if they are better than the upper classmen. Dan has done ALL of those things. He didn't leave. I'm HAPPY that he made those corrections and applaud him for it. Heck, he basically fired his college roommate last year and isn't leaving. And we're better for it- and will improve in the future. For example- Cadaver's recruiting example Dan can say the exact same thing about hard work but he just needs to add at the end of his sells pitch that the byproduct of doing that is championships in college at MSU. That's a very simple fix and doesn't compromise what Dan wants to do in any way.

So, as far as the play calling- I think Dan's play calling in general is fine. That tends to improve with better players. Inside zone looks a lot better when Aeris is running it as opposed to Holloway. 9 routes look better when Bear or Ross are running them compared to one of our outside receivers this year. I could go on with that but you get the point. But to give ourselves a chance to win against the big teams we CAN NOT have any glaring deficiencies at an entire position group like we have this year at WR. Again, that goes back to recruiting and making sure that every position group is filled three years before we play an opponent. I think if we can get to the point where we have top 20 recruiting classes and start stacking them we can get to the 9-10 win range consistently with Dan as our coach.

And I do think that Dan being a young coach and still learning is a good point. I think after 2015 when he realized how good he had it here I think he started to kind of re-focus and redouble his efforts to make us into what he wants us to be. And I think Ole Miss getting caught cheating and Cohen becoming the AD were good things for Dan as well. I think Cohen is going to be good at giving him resources he needs and helping him make good decisions off the field to becoming an elite program.

I like a LOT of the things that I am seeing on and off the field from MSU even though there are a few issues like the WR issue- but as long as I know that is being addressed I can handle and deal with it for the rest of the year.

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Originally Posted by HoopsDawg

That's not bad, but if you take out Bama, I guess you have to take out UK. That's makes him 23-27. Still, that's not horrible.

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I understand. Even with bama hes 30-36 and thats so much better than the preceding 10 years. We arent an embarrassment anymore.

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Originally Posted by Dawg61

UK is our 4th or 5th toughest SEC opponent this year. They don't get taken out.

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When doing stats, if you take out your worst, you have to take out your best. UK has been the team that Dan has done the best against.

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Originally Posted by Goldendawg

Until something happens to bama and I don't know what it is, there is already complacency that there is no hope to most of the West teams to win the West or an East team to win the SEC. Heck, little hope for the vast majority to win a natty due to bama. Today in church I asked a good guy, but a hardcore bama fan (live on bama line) if it was not getting boring to watch their one-sided blowout wins and were they even interested to the final four playoffs? His reply? "Haters gonna hate". They are not even happy in their situation, they want us to love them and embrace their success as they have ruined all competition in the SEC West, SEC, and even the national title playoffs. Most everyone else is an also ran before, during, and at the end of the season. We will always lose top rated Mississippi players to them in this situation. If I knew how to change this, I would be a football genius and it has dampened my overall interest in college football, even as a 40 plus year season ticket holder.

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Eventually Saban will leave. They will hire someone else who may be good but won't be as good as Saban- they will fire him for not being Saban and eventually cycle out like everyone else does. That's basically what happened when Bear Bryant left. After Alabama cycled out and Jackie had us doing pretty well we beat Alabama pretty consistently between 1996-2000. My hope is that when Saban leaves we will weather it out until then while everyone else makes terrible coaching decisions and then we win the SEC in 2031.

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Originally Posted by HoopsDawg

When doing stats, if you take out your worst, you have to take out your best. UK has been the team that Dan has done the best against.

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In about two months that's going to be Ole Miss.

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Originally Posted by HoopsDawg

When doing stats, if you take out your worst, you have to take out your best. UK has been the team that Dan has done the best against.

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Hoops is right. Those are the 2 outliers. We are 0-8 against bama, 7-1 against uk. I should have made that correction.

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Originally Posted by Dawg61

Nick Fitzgerald became only the 2nd QB in MSU history to have 25 rushing tds and 25 passing tds yesterday and not one single other poster has mentioned this besides myself. If you go back and look at the game thread only Bruns and a small few others aren't ripping Fitz a new one in the thread. My oh my has the perception of our program changed since Croom. C34 spent years telling everyone MSU could never hope to ever have the same talent as LSU or compete equally with LSU. Then he's on here last night defending that he never said LSU had less talent than MSU this year but that it was equal. This is what's wrong with our program right now. We aren't good enough to win like Bama, Auburn, Georgia this year yet we aren't happy to be winning like LSU, aTm and Florida. It took Clemson roughly sixteen straight seasons of slow improvement before they reached playoff/national championship level. We are in year 9 for Mullen. Sit back and try to enjoy the molasses climb it takes to get to where we all want to be ultimately. All the bitching and complaining doesn't make it happen any faster and if you try to cut corners you get ****ed in the ass like Ole Miss currently is not enjoying.

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Careful DAWG61 - you are starting to sound like me. Lol

The biggest problem with MSU is we’ve never given what few very good coaches we have had time to build a program.
Sasse burned out. McKeen banged the wrong girl. Warmath and Royal realized what they were up against and bugged out. Tyler pissed on the NCAA. Bellard seemed to give up. Jackie was a marked man. We never had that 25 year guy who built us into something and got his name on the stadium. The way I see it, Dan may be our last hope for that ever happening because of the way the game is run these days. To me that makes it imperative that we as fans and supporters do everything we can to keep moving us forward. We don’t need to go all Yancy and his lost sheep with it - but we do need to do a better job of pulling in the same direction and pushing toward the goal of getting us to the next level.