Joe Moorhead has turned Mississippi State football into a longterm project

Joe Moorhead is looking to build Mississippi State football into a championship contender and he’s overhauling the offense to make it one in the future. The problem with that is that he inherited a team ready to win now.

When Joe Moorhead arrived in Starkville, he started talking about setting a “championship standard.” Mississippi State football fans were obviously on board with the idea of winning the SEC and maybe one day competing for a national title. Moorhead was getting a highly talented team that won 9 games a season ago. There was little reason to doubt that this season could be a great one.

But this season isn’t a great one.

In fact, 2018 has been an incredible disappointment. The offense is floundering as it tries to adapt to Moorhead’s schemes and the Bulldogs are wasting one of the best defenses that MSU has ever seen. All three of Mississippi State’s losses were winnable games that a Dan Mullen coached team likely would have won. At most, MSU would have one loss at this point in the season.

So now, that leaves MSU’s current coaching staff trying to build for the future. Assuming things play out as they hopefully will, Moorhead will get his quarterback in Garrett Shrader on campus in this recruiting cycle. Even if Moorhead can’t get better quarterback play this season, Shrader provides some hope for the future.

This program and the Bulldogs’ offense might get actually get to where it can be down the road. Joe Moorhead can still be successful running the Mississippi State football program. There’s still a chance that he can lead this program to new heights at some point somewhere down the line. However, the problem still remains.

This year was still wasted and this team should be winning right now.

There’s still reason to believe that maybe, eventually Moorhead can get everything set to win at a high level in Starkville. He’s been in key roles of several great efforts at building up other programs. He can still do it here.

But it won’t be happening this year.

Maybe Keytaon Thompson or Garrett Shrader or Jalen Mayden can make this offense run at a high level next year. Maybe the Bulldogs can attain a new level of success next season. It’s just a shame that this year was wasted.