Passing Game of Mississippi State Football Team will Improve with Time
The Mississippi State Football team has dominated in its first two football games of the 2018 season, but there are concerns about the passing game.
When the Mississipppi State football team took the field against the Kansas State Wildcats on Saturday, Bulldog fans got to see Nick Fitzgerald take the field for the first time since his injury during the Egg Bowl in November. The results of Nick Fitzgerald’s play was mixed.
Fitzgerald ran the football for 159 yards on 19 carries, but he only completed 11 passes on 27 attempts. He did throw for two touchdowns and one interception, but there were also a number of drops.
Understandably, Mississippi State football fans were concerned about the inefficiencies in the passing game. But there is still reason to be hopeful that the passing game will turn around, and it has everything to do with Joe Moorhead.
When Joe Moorhead took over as offensive coordinator for the Penn State Nittany Lions, there were struggles in the passing game to begin with. The offense Joe Moorhead wants to run is not the easiest to implement without experience. The first six games for Trace McSorely in Joe Moorhead’s offense demonstrated just this.
In those six games, McSorely completed 58% of his passes for 1,327 yards and 8 touchdowns. Those aren’t bad numbers, but they pale in comparison to what he did in the rest of the year. In the final 8 games of the season, he passed for 2,287 yards 21 touchdowns. And if you go deeper in the numbers, you see that he struggled when the competition was raised during those six games.
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McSorely threw for over 660 of those yards in two games against Minnesota and Pitt. Neither team was good, and Minnesota made a change in their head coach after the season. The other four games during that six game stretch saw McSorely pass for under 700 yards. Trace McSorely’s first game in Joe Moorhead’s offense was also less than stellar. He only completed 16 of 31 pass attempts for 209 yards against Kent State.
The one area where the Mississippi State football team is ahead of Penn State offensively so far is in the running game. Saquon Barkley was showing signs of the dynamic player he was, but McSorely only ran for more than 100 yards once during that six game stretch and just 314 yards total.
The Mississippi State football team has a dynamic running game to rely on while the passing game finds itself under Joe Moorhead. Kylin Hill showed the Saquon Barkley comparisons are legitimate, Nick Fitzgerald will likely break the career rushing yards record for a quarterback in the next few games, and oh, there’s a 1,000 yard rusher on the bench for the Bulldogs in Aeris Williams.
Next. Players of the Game Against Kansas State. dark
The passing game will get better. There is evidence that it took time at Penn State and if Mississippi State fans are patient, the Bulldog offense should get to the point the Penn State offense was at before the schedule toughens up.