Moorhead takes complete control at MSU

The TaxSlayer Bowl is in the rearview mirror.

The 2017 Mississippi State football season has been put to bed. With that, the Joe Moorhead era is finally set to begin in earnest.

For the last month-plus since his hiring as the Bulldogs’ new head coach, Moorhead has sat in the background. He has evaluated. He has held together a recruiting class. All the while, Greg Knox oversaw the on-field efforts of MSU for bowl season.

Now that the bowl has come and gone, it’s finally fully Moorhead’s show at Mississippi State, and there is plenty of work to do.

“There is a lot on the agenda,” Moorhead said on Friday in Jacksonville, Florida, prior to the TaxSlayer Bowl. “We’re going to meet as a staff on the morning of (January 3). We’re just going to go through every department in the program and just talk about specifics. We’re going to talk about our January recruiting plan and talk about our January lifting and conditioning plan. We’ll talk about our preliminary plan for putting spring ball stuff together.

“There’s a long list of things to do. It’s compartmentalized. It’s organized. We just have to knock them all down one at a time.”

Not far down Moorhead’s to-do list is completing his coaching staff. Already, Mississippi State has made official the hires of Charles Huff (assistant head coach/run game coordinator/running backs coach), Andrew Breiner (pass game coordinator/quarterbacks coach), Marcus Johnson (offensive line coach), Mark Hudspeth (tight ends coach) and Bob Shoop (defensive coordinator/safeties coach). Moorhead said the rest of his staff will be announced by the end of the first week of January.

Some of those names have already begun to surface. The Starkville Daily News confirmed multiple media reports on

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