Mississippi State football ready to battle Iowa in 2019 Outback Bowl

The Mississippi State football team will soon face the Iowa Hawkeyes in the 2019 Outback Bowl. The Bulldogs should be ready for a tough, low scoring match up.

As the 2018 Mississippi State football season comes to a close, Joe Moorhead and the Bulldogs are headed down to Tampa, Florida to wrap things up. The Outback Bowl will be the final game of the season for MSU and Moorhead is looking to end his first year as the head coach in Starkville with a notable bowl victory over Iowa.

Mississippi State is bringing what has been arguably the best defense in the country to the Outback Bowl. Through the regular season, the Bulldogs led the country in scoring defense by holding teams to 12 points per game. Mississippi State’s defense limited opponents to 268 total yards per games, good for third best nationally.

But Iowa’s defense isn’t far behind in either of those categories.

Unfortunately for the Mississippi State football team, it looks like the Hawkeyes are brining a pretty great defense of their own into this game. Iowa has the 11th best scoring defense as they gave up 17.4 points per game and the Hawkeyes held teams to just 290 total yards per game which puts them at 7th best in that category.

Nick Fitzgerald, Kylin Hill, Aeris Williams, and the rest of Mississippi State’s offense better be ready for that. The Bulldogs’ offense picked things up as the season wore on, but MSU will still need to play mistake-free football in this game.

State can’t afford to give the Hawkeyes any breaks in this game. More importantly, the Bulldogs must take advantage of any scoring opportunity possible given that it seems unlikely that MSU will have many chances to score.

Hopefully a month of practices and rest will have helped prepare MSU for this game. Moorhead is familiar with Iowa from his time back at Penn State, so he should know some of its tendencies on defense.