Nothing today

Life outside of the blogosphere is rearing its ugly head, preventing me from posting anything substantial this week. My apologies. Things should return to normal starting tomorrow evening. Maybe it is for the best as it has been an unmitigated disaster for Mississippi State, highlighted by an 85-73 beatdown at the hands of Mississippi. I'll do my best to get all caught up on various news tomorrow as well as say my peace on the basketball team. There likely won't be anything good to say so if you're the optimistic type, cover your eyes.

South Carolina at Mississippi State

Miss St. lost at home to South Carolina 66-63. That was pathetic. That's all I have to say. Want to know what the last two shots were? A three by Dietric Slater with :07 left and a three by Jamont Gordon with :03 left. Brilliant. Have the two who are the worst 3 point shooters of all the guards take the last two attempts. Come on, Slater? He's about 24% beyond the arc on his career and he's the one taking the last shots??!!!. Disgusting. Enjoy sitting on your butts in March Bulldogs, you blew it.

Senior Bowl

Travis over at Hail State makes mention that Antonio Johnson has impressed at Senior Bowl practices. nfldraftcountdown.com has had some positive things to say,

Antonio Johnson of Mississippi St. really stood out with great hip explosion and drew positive notice from scouts.

and

Antonio Johnson of Mississippi St. continued his rise today as well and you could see him getting more and more attention from scouts, specifically those who run a 3-4 scheme

The same source implies he might be starting this evening in the Senior Bowl so check it out if you're into that kind of thing. Good luck to him at the next level.

UF 70 MSU 67

Looking back, its hard to pinpoint what exactly Miss St. did wrong in this game. Given the year so far your first two guesses would have to always be turnovers and free throw shooting. Well, you would be wrong......sort of. Miss St. had 9 turnovers and was 76.5% at the line, far outperforming their season averages. However, 7 of those turnovers did come in the second half and no doubt contributed to Florida gaining control of the game. As far as free throw shooting, Miss St. did make the most of their opportunities, but Florida got so many more. UF shot 34 free throws compared to Miss State's 17. Now, I suppose this would be the point where I should go on some incomprehensible rant about how the officials screwed us, we got jobbed, its a conspiracy, blah, blah, blah. If thats what your looking for then you came to the wrong place. Sorry. I could go on a rant of my own about fans complaining about officiating, but that one will be saved for another time.

A few notes and then we'll put this one to bed:
-Bottomline, UF had too much size for MSU. Stansbury ended up starting Vernon Goodridge and Charles Rhodes instead of a 4 guard line-up. Unfortunately, Goodridge picked up 5 fouls in only 12 minutes of playing time. This left horrible match-ups on the "bigs" for UF.

-Have I mentioned that I'm on the Barry Stewart bandwagon? No he isn't perfect, for example his defense could still use a little polish, but the guy is an assassin. If he gets an open shot, go ahead and count it. On the final play when Hansbrough lost the dribble before a shot could be gotten off, Stewart was open on the wing. If MSU had been able to get the ball to him in time, you think he was going to make it? Yeah, they were going to overtime.

-It looks like Miss St. is not good at finishing games. You can look at UF, UK, Clem, etc. Is it because they are young? Could be, at the very least that is a factor. Hopefully this will mean winning these close games will come in time. Maybe next year, maybe sometime later on this year. I would venture to guess that another reason is the lack of a true point guard. Gordon is great, but let's face it, he is playing out of position and Hansbrough still has some work to do. Gordon has improved at point since his freshman season and you have to assume the same will hold true for Hansbrough. So again, maybe this will also be solved with time.

The next two games are crucial for MSU. First, South Carolina at home because......well you just cannot lose to South Carolina at home. Even if they did just beat Arkansas, they're still a bad team. Losing to them on Saturday could be the death sentence for any post-season dreams, that includes the NIT. Then MSU is at Ole Miss. Miss St. needs to grab at least one road win, preferably two, and this is their best chance to do it.

Florida Escapes from The Hump

Florida played strong during the stretch run, just as you would expect them to, and managed to get a 70-67 win. More on it later.

Florida at Mississippi State

Truth be told, I'm not that big of a fan of game previews. At least I'm not a big fan of writing them. No matter who the author is they have a tendency to be simplistic and redundant. When you take away all the stats and filler, inevitably you're left with, "Team A needs to control the glass, limit turnovers, and hit the open shots in order to beat Team B". Thank you, you just gave me the most basic framework for winning any generic basketball game. I've heard it at least 1,000 times before, but I desperately needed to hear it again. Although, if I ever do have any amazing revelations on a game that few or no one else has thought about before, rest assured, you the readers will be the first to know about it. On that note:

The "Not A Preview" Preview!!!
-It'll be interesting to see whether Stansbury will stick with the 4 guard and 1 "big man" line-up he has been using throughout most of the season, or if he'll try and have Rhodes and Varnado/Goodridge in the game at the same time. Using this traditional PF/C combination has not been that effective the past two years, but Florida will probably be starting 3 players listed 6'9 or over.

-This isn't related to the play of the game itself, but MSU really needs a signature win. The highest rated opponent by the RPI that they have beaten thus far is Texas A&M Corpus Christi at #77. Ouch. It would be nice to be able to replace them with Florida.

-If MSU is shooting like they were in the 2nd half against Auburn, start dancing with glee. If it resembles something more along the lines of the 1st half of said game, prepare yourself for pain. There's going to be a lot of it.

-Wait, isn't that obvious? Didn't I just say that was the kind of thing I hated about previews? Oh well, 'eff it. Too late to turn back now.


I may do a liveblog of the game, I may just comment in this thread, I may do neither. In any case, this is the designated thread for game comments. Have at it.
GO STATE!

Quick Hits

Congratulations once again go out to Barry Stewart who won SEC freshman of the week for the 2nd straight week. In the win against Auburn, Stewart tied his career high with 22 points and was 10/10 from the free throw line.

Mississippi State's game against Florida on Wednesday will be a "white out" for the fans. If you don't know what that means, then the old cliche "you've been living under a rock" is a perfect fit for you. What they should do is try and get entire sections alternating between maroon and white. That would take a lot of coordination and effort on the part of the athletic department, which means it will probably never happen. I can still dream though.

Bulldogs 2nd Half Surge Too Much for Auburn

In the first half it looked like Auburn was going to continue the momentum from their upset over Tennessee on Wednesday. They were aggressive on offense and knocked down the open shots. Mississippi State didn't help themselves any, committing 9 turnovers and shooting just 34% in the first half. Auburn led by as much as 9 and would hold a 37-31 lead going into halftime. Entering this game, MSU was 0-6 when trailing at halftime. You could practically see their NCAA tournament hopes, and maybe even their NIT hopes, evaporating before your eyes. Maybe thats a bit overboard, but I'm not all that rational during a game.

Then the 2nd half happened. Reginald Delk led the way initially scoring 9 points, all on threes, in the first 41/2 minutes of the half. The last of which put MSU ahead 46-45. Turnovers on the next two possession by Rhodes and Gordon were taken advantage of by Auburn, letting them retake the lead 49-46. Richard Delk would then hit two free throws followed by Barry Stewart draining three pointers on three of the next four possessions. This left MSU with a 59-55 lead and they would never look back, stretching the lead as far as 13. Auburn did threaten at the end, closing the gap to 79-74 with 1:24 left, but the Bulldogs did something they rarely do to put the game away at this point.....make all their free throws. The 87-76 victory improved their record to 11-6(2-2).

Reginald Delk and Barry Stewart carried the team in term of scoring, combining for 42 points. Stewart led all scorers with 22 off the bench, and was 10/10 on free throws. After this game, consider me officially on the Barry Stewart bandwagon. Actually, I probably jumped on after the Miami game, but now it's official. He is second on the team in ppg coming off the bench and probably the best 3-point and free throw shooter on the team, and still a freshman. Out of high school he was being offered by the likes of East Carolina and Middle Tennessee State, until MSU stumbled upon him almost as an afterthought. Amazing, how did nobody want this kid? Barring any unfortunate circumstances, he's going to be a great one. Second on the team in scoring as a freshman, imagine what he'll be doing as a senior.

Jamont Gordon has 11 points, 11 rebounds, and 5 assists, giving him his third double-double of the season. He did have 5 turnovers, but MSU won so I won't harp on that. Besides, he does plenty of other things extremely well. Rhodes and Slater both put up 13 points and Slater added 4 assists and 8 rebounds. Slater is another player, along with Stewart, who is providing very high level production off the bench. Ben Hansbrough didn't score a point, but had 7 assists and just 1 turnover.

They took care of business at home, just like they were supposed to. The first half was less than impressive but the final score is all that counts. The SEC West is wide open right now with Alabama, LSU, and Mississippi State all tied for the lead at 2-2. It's doubtful that MSU will be able to take the West, but stranger things have happened I guess. The next opponent for Mississippi State is Florida. For only the second time the #1 team in the country will be coming to The Hump (the first being Kentucky in 1978). I don't foresee an upset, but then again "on any given night" right?

Recruiting News

It looks like MSU has pulled the scholarship offers from LBs Tim Holloway and Archie Sims. This cuts the total number of commitments down to 28, still too many to fit in this class. News flash: at least 2 more commits won't be around come signing day. Who those might be...I have no idea. As far as next years team goes, eh, this isn't a big deal. Linebacker depth doesn't appear to be the biggest issue.

In other news, Jessie Bowman was supposed to find out today if he would be able to get into school this semester. I'll put up an update when I hear something more.

Update: It's official, Jessie Bowman is enrolled for the spring semester. As I've already mentioned before Dominic Douglas and Josh Riddell are the other two JC players starting in January at MSU.

Quick Notes

I've wanted to write something about the general feeling around Mississippi State athletics right now. A fellow blogger did a better job than I would have, so here you go.

Congratulations to Barry Stewart on being named freshman of the week in the SEC. Ben Hansbrough won the honor as well earlier this season. More here.

Finally, Scout.com released their latest state rankings for football. It is my belief that when trying to rebuild a program, you need to start by winning the recruiting battles in your own state. Even if Mississippi is not exactly the most talent rich state in the country. Pretty even battle with Ole Miss having 10 commits in the top 30 compared to Mississippi State's 9. MSU has 5 in the top 10, Ole Miss has 3.

Mississippi State fails to close on the road....again. Part II

Alright, time to take another look at this thing now that I've had a chance to take the emotion out of the equation. I watched the game again this morning and was hoping to take on a pretty ambitious project. The goal was to break down individual possessions and grade players based on a very simplistic +1/-1 system. Then add up the +/- and see what I got. In the end, offensive performance was emphasized far too much for my liking, so I had to scrap the results. If I can figure out how to tweak my system, I will start posting the breakdown for every game that I'm able. Don't count on it though, this method of grading works much better for football and quiet honestly I'm not sure how to get it to translate over to basketball. In any case, its time to move on.

In hindsight I may have been a little harsh on Jamont Gordon. He does play out of control at times, 5 turnovers in the first half as evidence. He does try to drive to the basket, only to end up surrounded by defenders too often. He also scores about half the time on those types of plays. Yes, I really hated the last play of the game. Everyone knew Gordon was going straight to the basket. I would much rather have gotten Stewart or Hansbrough a look. Sure, supposedly he was going to kick the ball out if anyone was open, but I don't believe that was ever going to happen. Even had all 4 of his teammates been wide open, he was going to keep it all the way . On the other hand, without him would Mississippi State have been in position to tie or take the lead on that final possession? Hard to say, but I would guess no. Those other 39 minutes have to count for something.

I am not going to back down from the comments I made about "moral victories" though. You know what I heard a Bulldog fan say today? "I'm proud of how hard this team played. How can you expect them to be winning games at teams like Tennessee and Kentucky?" and "How can you criticize this team. The game was at RUPP ARENA." Is this what it has come down to at Mississippi State? That is a loser mentality if I have ever seen one. So they should have just forfeit yesterday's game? Why exactly shouldn't they be winning games at Kentucky, at Tennessee, at LSU, etc.? I don't know about you but I want more than mediocrity out of this team. Are they playing hard? Absolutely, but they need to start winning these games.

Mississippi State fails to close on the road....again.

The road troubles continue to plague Mississippi State as they fell at Kentucky 64-60, dropping them to 10-6 (1-2) on the season. I'll write up something more substantial on the game after I've calmed down a little. Right now, all I can think of is how tired I am of this mythical "moral victory". I'm sick of hearing "they played a good game BUT,". No, they lost. They didn't play good enough. In the meantime, I'm going to ponder just how wise it was for Gordon to be jumping into triple teams for half the game in what I will have to assume was a horribly misguided attempt to score.

Ringing the Cowbell

Got a few staff changes on the football team for you. Pat Washington, the WR coach at Kansas State, and Charlie Harbison, the WR coach at Alabama have both accepted new positions at Mississippi State. A little more information on the two here. Coach Croom is keeping quiet for now about what role they will be playing on the staff of Mississippi State. Amos Jones and Guy Holliday were "reassigned" to make room for Washington and Harbison.

Nice article about Barry Stewart and his surprisingly high level of play thus far.

Slater leads the way over rival Rebels 77-67

Mississippi State broke a 3 game losing streak and improved their record to 10-5 (1-1) . Dietric Slater was a force off the bench, pouring in 16 points and 12 rebounds to notch his 4th career double-double. Rhodes returned to the starting lineup and led the Dawgs in scoring with 17 points to go along with 8 rebounds. Barry Stewart was his usual solid self, scoring 12 points off the bench, and the thing I was most excited about....7/7 from the line. Finally, someone on this team can knock down some free throws.

Unfortunately I was not able to see the game. I did catch it on the radio, but any nitpicking or praise from me based on that would be nothing more than a shot in the dark. I will make note of a few interesting facts from the game though. Jamont Gordon was pulled out of the game in favor of Ben Hansbrough around the 12 minute mark in the 2nd half and never returned. Was this because of an injury? Seems unlikely since 24 hours after the game nothing of the sort has been reported. This leaves poor play as the reason, which makes sense considering he had shot 3 air balls at that point. Stans had this to say,

"I just thought we had some other guys playing well and I didn’t think Jamont [Gordon] was at his best tonight."

Good enough for me. Now, back to Rhodes, he led the team in another statistic....turnovers, with 6. He has been showing signs of playing at the level he was at last year these past two games though. Hopefully the turnover problem will fade soon enough. Free throw shooting was poor yet again outside of Stewart, and State had 17 turnovers. It has become apparent that this is not going to change this season. The team is what it is, turnover-prone and bad at the charity stripe. It would be pointless for me to bring it up game after game after game, so....I won't. In the future, unless I say otherwise, you can go ahead and assume Mississippi State had an obscene amount of turnovers and shot about 60% from the line.

Let's wrap this up on a positive note though. State dominated inside, outscoring Ole Miss 40-18 inside the paint. That is about as lopsided as it gets. The Bulldog bench also outscored the Rebel bench 32-7. Again, lopsided as it gets. If they can continued to control the inside and get that kind of production off the bench against tougher competition, look for them to spring an upset or two. Unfortunately that is a very big if. Finally I have to give credit to Dietric Slater. I've never been a big fan of his as a player. He's always seemed wild and out of control offensively. Every time I looked up, he was the one taking the shot between three defenders and, of course, missing it. Last night, he was arguably the best player on the court, though. Keep showing me how wrong I was about you Slater.

Some notes on incoming recruits and new personnel

According to Kyle Veazey of The Clarion-Ledger, three of this year's junior college football signees should be in class for the spring 2007 semester. The three are DT Jessie Bowman, SLM Dominic Douglas, and QB Josh Riddell. Bowman is waiting for results of a correspondence course before he can enroll. If I understand the NCAA rules correctly, this would mean they officially count toward the 2006 recruiting class. This means that at the moment, assuming Bowman ends up qualifying, Mississippi State has 27 commitments counting towards the 2007 class. This is not including the 3 soft-verbals that State has per scout.com. If these three hold to their commitment, that would bring the total to 30. I don't believe Mississippi State has enough scholarships for 30 players, so I would expect to see two or three recruits fall off the board for whatever reason before signing day. ( do not appear likely to qualify, back out and commit elsewhere, etc.)

Also, welcome Ben Pollard, the new strength and conditioning coach. It's a little hard for me to judge the merits of a conditioning coach based on on field performance of his team, so I won't even try. He does have a pretty good pedigree though, coming from Texas A&M and Alabama before that. Seems like a solid hire to me.

Bulldogs Lose 3rd Straight.

Mississippi State fell to 9-5 (0-1) after losing their conference opener at Tennessee. State trailed the entire game until 15:10 left in the 2nd half when they took the lead 58-56. Unfortunately they could not hold it as Lofton scored 11 points in the final 6:21 to lead Tennessee to the 92-84 victory.

This is a very frustrating loss to take. We'll get to why in a second, but first......I really do try and maintain a positive attitude about things. Always looking for that silver lining. I've had to force myself to do that alot with the Dawgs. ....I'm looking at you Croom. So after this loss was no different. So, lets take a gander at the positives.

This team played a pretty darn good game on the road against the 19th ranked team in the country. Far far better than they played at George Mason. (Not a bad loss though, right?? I mean, they were in the Final Four last year!!!......What? They're 0-3 in their conference? 0-3 in the CAA? Are you serious? I don't even know what the CAA stands for. God, we must suck.) Far better than they played against Missouri. cough....24 turnovers...cough. Another positive, Charles Rhodes decided to actually show up ready to play. After playing horribly for 3 or 4 games, he put up 15 points and 10 rebounds off the bench. Now thats more like it. They'll need good play from him the rest of the season. Jamont Gordon was a monster. 25 points, 11 rebounds, 9 assists. I mean, come on, seriously. And finally, only 14 turnovers.....actually that's not all that great generally speaking, but for this team, its terrific.

See look at that. Look at all the great things Mississippi State did in this game. Aren't you feeling better about the future already? Well before you do, let me mention why this loss was so frustrating. First, even with all the positives in the game, State still lost. They played a great game....and lost. .......Not good. Another problem, when I say they played a great game, I have been talking about the offense. The defense, not so much. Subpar would be the polite way to describe. And then there's those nasty old free throws. 10-19, 53% from the line. Way to go.

I don't know what to make of this team. It's very talented, it really is. They do alot of things well. The turnovers hurt them as well as the poor shooting from the stripe, but their is something else. I don't know what...I'll have to mull it over. Anyway, we got Ole Miss in The Hump on Wednesday. I cannot tell you how bad they need this game. There is more than state pride on the line.