Mississippi State football: 3 big overreactions from Bulldogs’ win vs. Arkansas

Overreaction No. 1: Bowl eligibility is around the corner for Zach Arnett and the Mississippi State football team

This might be the case, but this mess of a game against Arkansas didn’t exactly show much other than the Bulldogs’ defense might be fixed following the bye week.

A bowl game isn’t impossible for MSU, thanks in part to this win, and it’s certainly possible that Zach Arnett had a bit of a hand in making the defensive turnaround happen. But given the issues that showed up elsewhere for the Bulldogs, this game doesn’t exactly inspire a ton of confidence for Mississippi State’s bowl chances just yet.

MSU’s offense seemed dysfunctional and hesitant. Is this a Kevin Barbay issue, a quarterback adjustment issue, a running back depth and injury issue, some combination of all of those aforementioned issues, or a completely different issue altogether?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that this offense didn’t even remotely resemble the productivity what we saw from Barbay when he was at Appalachian State or Central Michigan. And it didn’t even remotely resemble the aggressive tendencies we saw from the Bulldogs when they faced the Alabama Crimson Tide and South Carolina Gamecocks.

Has something changed there other than the guy taking snaps at quarterback? Was MSU’s gameplan on offense centered around being slower and less aggressive?

I don’t know.

But I do know that the Bulldogs can’t afford to be that much of a dysfunctional mess on offense if they want to make a bowl game. And given that Arnett acknowledged something similar in his postgame press conference, it seems like the Bulldogs know that as well.