Mississippi State football announces hire of Cody Kennedy

Jeff Lebby was able to get an offensive line coach who is familiar with his offense when he hired Cody Kennedy to join Mississippi State football.

It’s generally a good thing to hire someone who understands the general direction your offense is going to go in. And so, when Jeff Lebby picked up Cody Kennedy out of Fayetteville and away from the Arkansas Razorbacks, it signaled that he’s pretty serious about running his offense well.

Mississippi State football confirmed that Lebby hired Kennedy to coach the Mississippi State Bulldogs offensive lines and Lebby clearly identified having offensive cohesion as being important for MSU.

Kennedy worked with Kendal Briles at Arkansas and understands how a veer-and-shoot offensive line is supposed to work. That’s an encouraging thing as Lebby brings a similar (though arguably more creative offense) to Starkville.

Mississippi State football confirms that Cody Kennedy was hired in Starkville

What’s great about hiring Kennedy is that he’s someone who was initially hired to be the guy replacing Jon Cooper as the Arkansas TE coach when Cooper left Briles and Fayetteville. And ultimately Briles moved Kennedy to OL.

So, not only do you have Kennedy on staff, but also you have the guy he was hired to replace on MSU’s coaching staff as well.

With bringing Kennedy to town, there’s a lot of familiarity with Lebby’s system on this coaching staff. That’s a good thing. I don’t particularly care that some people are upset about young coaches taking over at various roles in Starkville. While I was initially skeptical and critical of Lebby being the head coach at MSU, I’ve been pretty impressed with the staff he’s assembled.

And that includes bringing Cody Kennedy to town.

There are folks who are going to have strong opinions over this hire and a number of those folks happen to be Arkansas fans. It’s important to remember that while Arkansas struggled on the offensive line this past season, the university of Arkansas thought it was a good idea to drastically change the offense by moving from Kendal Briles’ veer-and-shoot to Dan Enos’ system.

And that’s a big change that will significantly limit what your offense can do. It’s hard to take compete stock in what’s going on in an offense when a drastic change in offensive philosophy like that is made.

MSU fans should also be more than aware of that concept.