Mississippi State football: Jeff Lebby to retain Chad Bumphis

While Jeff Lebby is looking to build his coaching staff, he’s decided to keep Chad Bumphis with the Mississippi State football team.

The Mississippi State football team is adjusting to the Jeff Lebby era and that means new faces all around Starkville. New coaches are coming in and old coaches will have to find new gigs somewhere else, unfortunately.

But a familiar face for Mississippi State football fans will still be in Starkville. Jeff Lebby has made the decision to keep Chad Bumphis, who will play a key role in adjusting Mississippi State’s wide receivers to the new offense that Lebby is bringing to MSU.

Bumphis announced the move on X (previously Twitter):

And Bumphis is going to play a huge part in helping Mississippi State modernize its offense in a drastically different way than he was expecting when he was initially hired.

Mississippi State football: Chad Bumphis to be retained by Jeff Lebby

It’ll be interesting to see how Mississippi State’s wide receivers perform this season. Bumphis, when he arrived back in Starkville back in January, spoke highly of the receivers on the roster at Mississippi State.

During this discussion, he noted that going forward the receivers would have to adjust to leaving the Air Raid and learning a “real route tree,” but he was excited about the direction the offense was going.

Now there’s going to be another shift with the direction of the Mississippi State offense. And it’s going to be drastically different. If it’s anything like what Lebby has run elsewhere and what the veer-and-shoot typically looks like, we’re not going to see the sort of “real route tree” that Bumphis was discussing in January.

So, there’s a learning curve to go through once more. And as Ian Boyd of America’s War Game notes, “the route tree shrinks down” in most versions of the veer-and-shoot offense.

The passing attack is going to look incredibly different than what it did this past year and it’s going to look different from what we saw with the Air Raid. Bumphis will have to help prepare his receivers to play in a route tree that doesn’t look like what he was expecting when he was hired.

But, he seems like a bright mind who is focused on helping Mississippi State thrive. He wants his alma mater to succeed. And with the way he recruits and connects with talented wide receivers and the way he helped coach the Utah Utes wide receivers, it’s more than evident that the Bulldogs are keeping a good wide receivers coach in Starkville.

It just so happens that he, and the rest of everyone who will pay attention to Mississippi State football next season, will see a very modern and very interesting passing attack in Starkville. Here’s to hoping that it works.