Joey Harvey is a junior majoring in communication. He can be contacted at [email protected].A simple scheduling change would have made a ton of difference in the general attitude toward the Mississippi State football team.
The team is currently 2-1, boasting our school’s first winning record since 2005. However, this team has worked up a streak of its own, having won two straight games, both on the road, against Tulane and SEC West opponent Auburn.
We sit at 2-1, and several of my friends are already making bowl plans. I wouldn’t suggest that quite yet, but we do have a right to be proud of our football team after these past two outings. They have performed well, and the flaws we still have on the team have been smaller flaws than our opponents.
As a result, we’re sitting with a winning record with a somewhat tasty schedule ahead of us. We fans didn’t think about this until after the Auburn victory, however. In fact, after the first game, many of us were ready to throw in the towel for yet another gross season.
Making a simple schedule shift could have changed this entire attitude: moving the LSU game from the first game to the third game.
We’d then have played Tulane first, Auburn second and then LSU, before continuing the schedule we currently have.
I’d like to flash back to the consensual attitude about our Bulldogs just after our nationally-televised 45-0 loss to No. 2 LSU. It is safe to say that the general feeling was a combination of dread and despair, and the idea was that we had no quarterback and Coach Croom’s job was in jeopardy.
Moving forward to week two, we saw, again on national television, the No. 2 LSU Tigers completely dismantle No. 9 Virginia Tech by a 48-7 score. While listening on the radio to our Bulldogs defeating Tulane 38-17, we saw that the halftime score of the LSU-VT game was 24-0, and thought to ourselves, “Hmm … LSU was only beating us by 17 at the half…and it actually should have only been 10. Obviously, we aren’t as bad as we thought we were.”
If our game against LSU would have taken place after the Virginia Tech game rather than before it, we would have known how good LSU is beforehand and wouldn’t have blamed loss out on our Bulldogs.
It was after the Tulane-Virginia Tech week we regained a somewhat neutral feeling toward our team, still leaning more toward the negative side of the fence, due to the fact that we only beat Tulane. Not that big of a deal right?
Week three brought our team yet another win as we upset Auburn by a score of 19-14, in a game in which turnovers was virtually the only category we topped Auburn in. Oh, and points, of course.
Though our quarterback issues haven’t been completely solved yet, fans still feel a little better about them after a semi-impressive showing by Wesley Carroll and Josh Riddell Saturday.
Fans are happier with Croom and the rest of the coaching staff than we were two weeks ago, as well.
All of this negative-attitude madness could have been avoided by moving the LSU game from that Thursday night in which ESPN treated us like a joke to the second Saturday in September.
Starting 2-0 would have looked much better than 0-1, and we’d be just as ready as we are now for our upcoming schedule.