Mississippi State football film study: Jeff Lebby's offense takes flight

The Jeff Lebby-era in Starkville started off with a bang. Mississippi State football lit-up Eastern Kentucky 56-7 to open up the 2024 season, and the talk of the game, understandably, was the offense. We've been dying to see Lebby's attack in real game action, and it lived up to the billing.

State ran a pretty bare-bones version of Lebby's offense, but that was more than enough to light up Eastern Kentucky and make Bulldog fans giddy about what's to come.

Let's look at a few of the big plays from Saturday that showcased the explosive nature of this offense.

State strikes fast

All we've heard about since Jeff Lebby was hired was how he wants his team to "score from far". It took just three plays for the Bulldogs to accomplish that against Eastern Kentucky.

State attempted to take a shot on the game's opening play, faking a jet sweep into a play-action Post/Over concept. They wanted to hit Jordan Mosley on the deep post, but EKU had it covered and Shapen fired incomplete on the checkdown attempt. Ironically, Lebby called the exact same play on Oklahoma's first drive of the 2023 season, hitting that post for a huge gain.

On 2nd down Shapen finds Mosley on an access hitch route to pick up the first. On 1st & 10, Lebby calls for Inside Zone, but as is the case with the majority of his run calls, there's a RPO tag attached.

State's in 11 personnel with the TE in the backfield. EKU shows 2-high safeties, and with just six defenders in the box, State has numbers to run the ball. But Lebby doesn't want his QBs simply handing the ball off based on pre-snap alignment. If the defense chooses to bring an extra player into the box late to outnumber the run, the offense needs to have an answer. That answer is to execute a post-snap read for the RPO.

If an extra defender comes at the snap, throw the football. In this case, Shapen is reading the boundary safety (#24). Sure enough, EKU rotates to 1-high, bringing the BS into the box as a run-stopper. Seeing this, Shapen knows he needs to pull the ball and throw, and he again looks to Mosley.

The corner (#6) over Mosley is supposed to drop into a deep zone in this look, but seeing the run-fake, he stays flat-footed. Mosley runs right by him, and Shapen connects on the easiest long TD of his career. Had the CB dropped, Mosley would've just hitched-up his route underneath for a short completion, but that wouldn't have been nearly as exciting.

Creating a mismatch

In the passing game, State primarily attacked EKU's CBs. Part of the philosophy in this offense is to "find the donkeys", as in, identify whoever their worst player is and go at him all night long. State had a huge mismatch on the outside with Jordan Mosley and Mario Craver against the EKU CBs, so many of the concepts targeted them.

But it'd be crazy to not design some sort of shot for the electric Kevin Coleman out of the slot, and that's what we saw on State's fourth TD of the game.

All night long, EKU was aligning in 2-high shells on defense and rotating into 1-high at the snap to bring a safety down to help stop the run. It's not an uncommon way of attacking this style of offense, and to give EKU some credit, they had some success doing that to limit MSU's run game.

The problem with that philosophy was that it allowed MSU's WRs to play iso-ball against EKU's DBs, and as we know, that didn't go well for them. Lebby took advantage of that midway through the 2nd quarter to get Kevin Coleman 1-on-1 with a safety, and it went exactly to plan.

EKU runs that rotation into a Fire Zone blitz (5 rushers, 3 underneath defenders, 3 deep defenders). The whole idea of a Fire Zone is to get pressure on the QB while not risking getting beat over the top as can so frequently happen in a traditional man blitz look.

But in order for the "don't get beat deep" part of the equation to work, you need to actually pressure the QB (State's OL picks up the blitz perfectly), and ideally need your DBs to be good enough to cover (they weren't).

The BS (#24) rotates down responsible for covering the seam to the flat. Mario Craver runs a post route, occupying the CB (#6) and leaving the BS 1-on-1 with Kevin Coleman. Coleman runs an "out and up" wheel route. Selling the out is important here, because with the BS responsible for the flat, he has to react to that.

Coleman gives a glance the backfield, turns up the sidelines, and leaves the BS in the dust. Shapen hits him the back corner of the endzone, and it's 28-0.

Pouring it on

As I just mentioned, this offense is designed to identify and create mismatches and repeatedly take advantage of them. EKU's CBs could not stay with State's outside WRs 1-on-1, so Jeff Lebby kept going back to that well.

Late in the 2nd, Lebby dialed up his Outside Choice concept for Mario Craver. Outside Choice is a part of the Deep Choice series and targets, shocker, an outside WR. Whichever WR is tagged with the choice route has three options: run a vertical, run a snap/comeback, or run a post.

He'll make that decision based on the leverage and depth of the CB across from him. The QB is looking to read that CB the same as his WR does so that the throw goes to the right spot. Meanwhile the slot WR next to the tagged player will run what's called a "bender", a 10-yard in-breaking route largely intended just to occupy the safety.

Usually when running Outside Choice vs a corner playing off and with inside leverage, the WR will snap his route back underneath to the QB. In fact earlier in the game, Outside Choice was called for Craver, and that's exactly what he did.

But in this case, the CB, despite being off and inside, doesn't quickly get depth, and Craver is able to run right past him for the long score.

Once again, EKU rotated down into 1-high. This is the risk of playing 1-high against this offense. Maybe you can slow the run game, but if your DBs can't stay with the WRs you're dead in the water. And the choice routes make it incredibly difficult for most teams to ever stay with those WRs.

(To be fair, staying in 2-high wouldn't have helped this group of DBs all that much at containing the Bulldogs, but still)

Obviously, it will rarely be this easy for Mississippi State. They were facing a FCS team with a bad defense that had no chance of covering the Bulldog wideouts. Better and more talented defenses won't be as easy to attack. But State also won't be running such a basic version of the offense against those teams either.

This system is going to keep them in games almost every week, and it's going to be a ton of fun to watch.