Mississippi State football: 3 lessons learned from win vs. Arizona
By John King
Mississippi State football vs. Arizona lesson 2:
The offensive coaching was a conundrum
I wish I could tell you exactly what we were doing on offense on Saturday, but I can’t.
It looked like we were holding back and trying not to give our future opponents tape. Which is fine to do early in the season against inferior competition, but Arizona is not so inferior. It seemed like most of the armchair QB’s agreed that the offensive playcalling was just plain bad.
For a majority of the game, our quarterbacks were mostly vessels to give the ball to someone else, just there to catch the snap and hand the ball off. Will Rogers, who came into the game less than 300 yards away from passing Peyton Manning in all-time passing yards, only had 90 yards passing halfway through the second half.
Even the running game wasn’t very interesting — some of our dynamic playmakers (Tulu Griffin, Mike Wright, and Creed Whittemore) had two carries for -5 yards. Creed Whittemore was conspicuously absent in the game after turning 6 touches into 116 yards and 2 touchdowns the week before.
Overall, the offense left everyone asking for more.
In this space, I’m supposed to be giving a lesson, and I’m telling you that the lesson is we don’t know. We really have no idea what our offense is and we can only hope that the creativity and scheme will improve as we get further into the season.