Mississippi State football: 3 areas to improve vs. Western Michigan

As Mississippi State football tries to move forward after the loss to Alabama, here are three areas the Bulldogs should look to improve.

Things didn’t go well for the Mississippi State football team as Zach Arnett and the Bulldogs hosted the Alabama Crimson Tide. Mississippi State was aiming to pull off an unlikely upset and clearly played very physical football, especially early on.

But Alabama proved to be too much for the Bulldogs.

The Crimson Tide was able to set the tone for the game early after taking advantage of MSU’s inability to take advantage of miscues. And the Crimson Tide very quickly jumped out to a 14-0 lead over the Bulldogs.

Alabama kept cruising and MSU ended up falling 40-17. There were some bright spots for Arnett and MSU, but things got ugly in a hurry and State just couldn’t keep up.

That said, the season isn’t over yet.

There are still seven more games to be played and the Bulldogs desperately need to start getting some wins. And that starts this week as MSU hosts Western Michigan.

Mississippi State football: 3 areas of improvement MSU needs vs. Western Michigan Broncos

Here are three areas of improvement that Mississippi State football fans will desperately want to see out of the Miss. State Bulldogs when MSU welcomes the Western Michigan Broncos to Starkville:

Get the ground game established and run the heck out of the ball

Mississippi State actually had some success running the ball against the Alabama Crimson Tide defense, but the Bulldogs couldn’t focus enough on this aspect of their offense and had to largely move away from this for a couple reasons.

One, Alabama started building a really solid lead and running the ball is not an effective way of trying to catch up. Two, it sure looked like Jo’Quavious Marks got dinged up against Alabama’s defense and the Bulldogs had to settle in on a running back by committee sort of approach without Woody.

But just look at this, it’s beautiful:

The Bulldogs really seem to want to run the ball and they found some success doing that against Alabama. Here’s to hoping that they can do just that against Western Michigan and limit some of the errors that are seemingly popping up out of nowhere in the passing game.