CC: Sports Illustrated Spends a Week with Mississippi State
For those in the Mullen camp here is a story that will be in the Oct 13 edition of SI. It is one of those "a week with ABC team" behind the scenes stories. Going to be an interesting few weeks for a program not used to the glare.
An agricultural school often ridiculed for the cowbells that the fans ceaselessly clang in the stands during games, Mississippi State is now the bell cow for Moneyball-style innovation -- thriving in the SEC on a relative shoestring. After decades of doing less with less, the Bulldogs are doing more than anyone could have imagined, fulfilling the vision of sixth-year coach Dan Mullen. In the windowless coaches’ locker room on Saturday, 18 minutes before the kickoff, he started plotting the broadcast of ESPN’s College GameDay from Starkville the following week, assuming his team’s showdown with Auburn would merit the school’s first-ever visit. (He was right.) Mullen told athletic director Scott Stricklin that he wanted Pascagoula native Jimmy Buffett to be the celebrity guest game picker. “Imagine Will Ferrell jumping up on the set with his belly hanging out and screaming, More cowbell!” Mullen said, referencing a 2000 Saturday Night Live skit.
Mississippi State went 9-4 in Mullen’s second season and went to the Gator Bowl, handing Michigan its worst bowl loss, 52-14. That began a run of four straight bowl games, a first for the school. There was joy in Starkville, except one problem persisted: Mullen was 2-21 against Top 25 teams.
The 13 Bulldogs in the NFL since Mullen arrived -- including two first-round choices -- had an average star ranking on Scout.com of 2.9 out of five. That’s the embodiment of Mullen’s plan: Take three-star recruits and turn them into five-star players through effort. The staff does that through early identification, relying on its own film evaluations over recruiting rankings and emphasizing to kids on official visits how hard they’ll work instead of telling them how great they are.
October 10th, 2014 at 7:02 AM ^
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October 10th, 2014 at 7:30 AM ^
October 10th, 2014 at 9:22 AM ^
Are you suggesting Brady is two years away from kicking major asssssssss?
October 10th, 2014 at 9:38 AM ^
October 10th, 2014 at 12:31 PM ^
I wanted RichRod to stay, just to see 2 more years of Denard running his system. Let's not forget Denard's historic sophomore year was just a taste. Can you imagine what our offense would have been when Denard was in his 3rd year with RichRod?
October 10th, 2014 at 1:54 PM ^
Rich Rod was one year away from kicking major ass. I still think he could have gone undefeated in 2011 and maybe 2012 with Denard. Denard might have won a Heisman with Rich Rod.
And now we get to watch Rich Rod's offense every time Michigan is beaten by ND or Ohio. Ugh.
October 10th, 2014 at 3:37 PM ^
Who was going to be RR's DC in 2011? Was Tony Gibson still going to coach DBs?
Ay, there's the rub.
2011 was the fortuitous marriage of an exisiting offensive system, left behind from a staff that understood offense but not defense, and a new staff that understood defense but not offense. I don't think either RR or Hoke could have pulled it off alone.
October 10th, 2014 at 8:44 PM ^
So quickly people forget how impotent Rich Rod's offense was against any team with a pulse not named Notre Dame.
October 11th, 2014 at 9:43 AM ^
October 13th, 2014 at 8:52 PM ^
I agree that he never got a fair shake here and wish he had. At the time I wanted him to get another year as well. But the revisionist history about how great his offense was at Michigan is just wrong, the offense was terrible against every decent team we played (except ND). If we lost shootouts to OSU and MSU (both of MSUs) instead of blowouts I'd agree and he probably would have gotten at least another year.
October 10th, 2014 at 11:12 AM ^
October 10th, 2014 at 12:37 PM ^
you dont know bad coaching when you see the results. Hoke has had plenty of talent. Hoke just does not know how to develop talent.
4th year here. Who is the best Hoke recruit on the team? Funchess. Name another futrue NFL player Hoke has brought in.
and to act as if having to coach Denard, the reigning Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year , is having his "hands tied"
Ho Ho Hoke. the joke is on us.
October 10th, 2014 at 7:56 AM ^
Early on, Mullen called a meeting for everyone involved with football -- faculty, secretaries, staff -- and delivered words that made then athletic director Greg Byrne cringe: “You are part of the problem.” Mullen insisted that the way things had always been done hadn’t worked. “We have to change everything,” he said.
Now there's an interesting tactic, and it seems to have paid off for Mullen. I think we do forget sometimes that there is so much that goes on to make these teams ultimately function and that there is a large group in a lot of FBS programs that have jobs which at least brush their football program in some way. If you really want wholesale culture change - in this case to instill a "Yes, we can do this" attitude - this is actually not a bad way to go about it, to try to get everyone involved in the change.
October 10th, 2014 at 8:41 AM ^
Being someone that challenges processes for a living and does not accept "because we've always done it that way" as a reason for doing anything, I love this idea. However I don't think this sort of meeting would ingratiate anyone to the brass here. I would imagine there is less infrastructural resistance to burning the whole thing to the ground and rebuilding at Mississippi State than there is at Michigan. This is not the sort of culture that takes kindly to being told that its old ideologies do not work and need rebooting.
October 10th, 2014 at 10:36 AM ^
"This is not the sort of culture that takes kindly to being told that its old ideologies do not work and need rebooting".
And that EXACTLY IS the problem. M will never dig its way out unless there is a wholesale change in that attitude.
October 10th, 2014 at 8:14 AM ^
October 10th, 2014 at 8:22 AM ^
On another note, Gameday is covering a pep rally at my son's school which will air during the game (Mississippi State - Auburn). My little guy is 6 and hurting. He has epidermolysis bullosa. He will be in a wheel chair with his Dak Prescott jersey and Lego crocs (the only shoes we can get on his sore feet).
October 10th, 2014 at 8:30 AM ^
Go Miss. St.!
October 10th, 2014 at 8:26 AM ^
October 10th, 2014 at 8:41 AM ^
October 10th, 2014 at 8:54 AM ^
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October 10th, 2014 at 8:57 AM ^
It's not just $$. We can offer resources here that Miss. St. can't, and it's much, much easier to win a national champtionship here than it is from there. Florida is the real problem.
October 10th, 2014 at 9:10 AM ^
out-of-the-way location at a school without an impressive national football tradition elect to stay there, passing up opportunities to go to "bigger" programs. Joe Paterno turned down Don Canham's offer to come to the big city of Ann Arbor before Bo was hired, choosing to stay in Happy Valley, a thousand miles from nowhere.
October 10th, 2014 at 9:48 AM ^
I agree, there's some possibility he might not want to leave. I just doubt he's planning to spend his career at one of the most difficult places to win consistently, when places like Michigan and Florida will be knocking on his door.
I would think Miss. St. ranks near the very bottom of easiest places to win. No history and stuck in the toughest division of the toughest conference in football. Kudos to him if he wants to stick it out, but no matter how well he coaches, it's tough to win without a lot of nice bounces year in and year out.
October 10th, 2014 at 10:28 AM ^
True, although I wonder how much better the Michigan job really looked compared to Penn State in 1969. I mean Bo himself pointed out that the state of facilities at Michigan when he got there were far from world class at the time. The only thing Michigan really had going for it was reputation. It's not like Canham was going to offer JoePa a massive pay raise to come take over a Michigan program that was state of the art....that might have had something to do with his turning the job down.
October 10th, 2014 at 3:43 PM ^
But you have to remember, PSU was an independent at this time, whereas the Big Ten was in its heyday. Michigan would have definitely been the more prestigious program. JoePa just happened to be settled where he was and not ready to leave.
October 10th, 2014 at 10:28 AM ^
We've always had money. We've gotten our fourth choice the past two coaching searches. A guy who was the head coach at Rutgers turned down an offer to jump ship.
October 10th, 2014 at 8:42 AM ^
"That’s the embodiment of Mullen’s plan: Take three-star recruits and turn them into five-star players through effort"
Now I know our problem. Our coaching staff got this one backwards.
October 10th, 2014 at 8:52 AM ^
Guess who hired Mullen at Miss. State? Greg Byrne
Guess who hired Rodriguez at Arizona? Greg Byrne
October 10th, 2014 at 9:13 AM ^
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October 10th, 2014 at 8:59 AM ^
So even though Byrne's first hire—Mullen—beat the crap out of Rodriguez's team in the Gator Bowl, Bryne still thought enough of RR to hire him at AZ. Interesting.
October 10th, 2014 at 9:08 AM ^
Perhaps Byrne is smart enough to realize that really good coaches can be undermined and doomed to failure if enough people with purely selfish agendas are working hard enough to make sure the coach fails. Perhaps Byrne recognized that the insanely toxic and divisive environment at Michigan meant anyone who didnt have bloodlines back to Bo would be actively and agressively attacked and destroyed from within. And maybe Byrne saw that those people - who put their own interest, bias and agendas ahead of the football program itself kept a good coach from every really having a chance so he looked at the West Virginia success rate and figured Rich hadnt forgotten how to coach winning football teams.
Or he just really, really liked Rita's nachos.
October 10th, 2014 at 10:15 AM ^
Or Byrne didn't notice Michigan had ten guys on the field for two of MSU's touchdowns that day.
This whole "RR failed solely because he was undermined" narrative is revisionist at best. Those teams were bad, if not dysfunctional, no matter what was going on off the field.
October 10th, 2014 at 10:41 AM ^
Well it would seem Rich has figured out how to get all 11 players on the field now. Can't say the same for our current regime.
Maybe it's a Michigan "thing"
October 10th, 2014 at 10:53 AM ^
Actually, I agree. RR made some serious mistakes while he was here, foremost being the bizarre decision to hire Greg Robinson. The moment I heard on radio in my car in a westside grocery parking lot that RR had selected GERG to be the DC, I thought that he'd ensured his own doom.
How any coach in RR's position—coming off a 3-9 season that had at least half the Michigan fanbase screaming for his scalp—could think that it made good sense to hire the guy who had just been fired after leading Syracuse to four of the worst seasons in its long history is still a mystery to me.
October 10th, 2014 at 1:59 PM ^
October 10th, 2014 at 3:54 PM ^
Hiring GERG was part of the problem. The other part was insisting that he run the 3-3-5, which he did not know how to run effectively, If GERG had been left alone to run his preferred 4-3 scheme, we might not have been quite as bad. His Texas defenses were decent.
October 10th, 2014 at 12:34 PM ^
October 10th, 2014 at 9:15 AM ^
Good, but can he take 5-stars and turn them into 8 stars?
October 10th, 2014 at 9:47 AM ^
October 10th, 2014 at 10:11 AM ^
Thanks for this. A theme that I'm wondering about now seems to be emerging - perhaps that while Hoke and company are hard workers, they're not necessarily all that smart about the work that they do. Coaches ilke Mullen (and RichRod) seem to be able to do both the hard work and the smart work necessary.
I'm not jumping on the Brady-Hoke-is-dumb bandwagon. I don't know. There is a difference, though, between being innovative and resourceful (and putting people in a situation where they can use their skills) and being able to follow others well.
October 10th, 2014 at 11:57 AM ^
Why would he leave an SEC program that's currently ranked 3rd in the country while also having the #11 recruiting class in the country to come a place where it's next to impossible to pull talent from the south?
While also dealing with an unbelievably impatient fan base (myself included).
October 10th, 2014 at 12:18 PM ^
Because even he must know his success at Mississippi State isn't sustainable