Mississippi State football: Can Joe Moorhead fix this offense?
By Ethan Lee
Can the new head coach of the Mississippi State football team jump start this offense anytime soon?
The Mississippi State football team is not doing well on the offensive side of the ball. Tonight, the Bulldogs looked completely lost and only accumulated 202 yards of total offense. This is the second game in as many weeks when the Mississippi State football team has struggled on offense. Last week, the Bulldogs got 201 yards of total offense against Kentucky.
Joe Moorhead is supposed to be a great offensive innovator and the Bulldogs are struggling on that side of the ball.
In 2016, Moorhead was the offensive coordinator of the Penn State Nittany Lions. He was trusted to come in and fix Penn State’s offense. It took him some time, but that was expected. Eventually, he got it going. However, there was certainly a time when the Nittany Lions struggled on offense.
To start their 2016 season, Moorhead’s offense only gained 354 total yards against Kent State. That next week, Penn State got 401 yards on offense but lost to Pitt. They followed that up with 403 yards against Temple but only won by a touchdown. To end the month of September, Penn State scored 10 total points and gained 191 yards against Michigan.
Like MSU this year, Penn State slogged through the month of September at times in 2016 and looked abysmal on offense as the players tried to accustom themselves to Moorhead’s offense.
However, things started to improve as the Nittany Lions progressed through October. It wasn’t immediate, but Penn State got better and then eventually became the explosive offense that we talk about now.
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The Nittany Lions out-dueled Minnesota with a tight game in overtime after their loss to Michigan. The offense looked a bit better during the fifth game of the season for Penn State, but it wasn’t explosive enough at that point. In the sixth game, the second week of October, Moorhead’s offense obliterated Maryland. And then it produced just enough to give the Nittany Lions a win over then No. 2 Ohio State.
By the end of October in 2016, that offense fully bloomed into one that scored a season high 62 points against a lowly Purdue team. It took time, but the Penn State offense improved as October progressed.
Nobody can guarantee that this same thing will happen with the Mississippi State Bulldogs. These two situations are considerably different and it’s impossible to say that Nick Fitzgerald will make the progression that Trace McSorely made. And it’s not like the Bulldogs’ offensive line is helping out any.
It’d be great to say that the Mississippi State football team was going to become a force to be reckoned with on offense. If the Bulldogs could reach the fullness of their potential, then they’d be scoring points by the dozen. Moorhead, as a head coach, has to find a way to make MSU’s offense bounce back the way that Moorhead, as an offensive coordinator, made Penn State’s offense bounce back.