Mississippi State football team must beat Florida to salvage season

The Mississippi State football team must beat the Florida Gators this weekend to prove that the Kentucky loss was an anomaly

Losing to Kentucky by 21 points wasn’t something that was expected by most Mississippi State football fans. It flat out wasn’t expected by many college football fans across the country.

Regardless of expectations, it happened.

The Mississippi State Bulldogs, then the No. 14 ranked team in the nation, fell to unranked (and undefeated) Kentucky by three touchdowns on the road in a game in which MSU’s offense was completely inept.

And, well, now what?

Although Joe Moorhead has said that one game will not be all that defines this 2018 Mississippi State football team, what happens next could certainly dictate what the rest of this season looks like for the Bulldogs. That’s all depending on what happens against the Florida Gators in Davis Wade Stadium this Saturday.

At this point, the Florida game is a must win for Joe Moorhead and his team. It’s that way for a few different reasons.

1. The Bulldogs need wins to seal up bowl eligibility and the schedule doesn’t get any easier any time soon.
2. The Bulldogs have to prove to their fans that they are better than how they played on Saturday to get fans to buy back into the direction of this football program.

Bowl eligibility

Florida could be a rather tricky opponent, but they are far from the most difficult remaining foe on MSU’s schedule. The Bulldogs have several tough tests coming up and only a couple of them can realistically be taken for granted after the Bulldogs loss to Kentucky.

That’s Arkansas and Louisiana Tech.

Nobody should realistically automatically count the Mississippi State football games against No. 10 Auburn, at No. 5 LSU, against Texas A&M, and at No. 1 Alabama as wins. It’s not reasonable.

And yes, there’s one game that I haven’t counted yet and that’s the Egg Bowl. Honestly, right now, who truly knows what’s going to happen in that rivalry game? It could go either way at the moment and that’s a scary thing to consider given the amount of hype that MSU had coming into the season.

And so, for the purposes of bowl eligibility, Mississippi State has to win against Florida this weekend. That would set up MSU to be 4-1 through five games. That means that the Bulldogs need to claim at least two wins from seven different games.

Not too hard, right?

Restoring lost trust

Throughout the offseason, Joe Moorhead preached that the Mississippi State football team would set a “#Championship standard.” Moorhead wasn’t coming to just maintain the status quo at MSU, he wanted to elevate the Bulldogs to the top of the Southeastern Conference and compete for championships.

He wanted to do that in year one.

After the Bulldogs lost to Kentucky, it’s clear that the honeymoon between MSU fans and Moorhead is over. He’s catching flak and rightfully so. How Mississippi State performed this past Saturday was beyond embarrassing. And now, Moorhead gets to face the man that built the Mississippi State football program into the kind of team that has won at least nine games in three of the past four seasons.

Dan Mullen will take the field with the team that he left MSU for and that’s incredibly infuriating for fans of the Bulldogs. Especially so after Mississippi State lost to Kentucky this past weekend.

There’s plenty of people upset with Moorhead right now and questioning whether or not he can actually carry the Bulldogs forward. A win over Mullen would at least satisfy some of that anger MSU fans are feeling at the moment.

This was supposed to be a great year for the Mississippi State football team. It still can be. The Bulldogs could turn everything around and get to nine or ten wins. But Moorhead and MSU have to prove that. And that starts this Saturday.