Dawgs have penalty problems

STARKVILLE — Mississippi State head coach Joe Moorhead said Monday afternoon that the two biggest factors that determine the outcomes of football games are explosive plays and turnover margin.

Through two weeks, his No. 16 Bulldogs (2-0) have done well in both categories.

State has won the turnover battle by one in each of the first two games. MSU is also tied for third in the nation in plays from scrimmage that have gone for 20plus yards. The Bulldogs’ offense has 19 of those. The defense has surrendered only four.

But two areas that Moorhead’s team has yet to nail down are penalties and substitutions. Mississippi State beat Kansas State convincingly on the road in spite of 11 penalties for 84 yards. The team averages 82 penalty yards per game, which ranks 110th in the nation.

Penalties can ‘get ya’ in tight games

“There’s a certain amount of penalties that are going to occur throughout the course of a game… but to me, it’s the ones that are manageable from a coaching standpoint or manageable from a player, simple execution standpoint (that hurt),” Moorhead said.

Mississippi State took a delay of game penalty before its first field goal of the game. Those yards could be costly in tighter games later in the season, but Moorhead said the penalty gave Christmann a better angle. He knocked it through.

When State took yet another delay of game penalty before a Christmann attempt late in the fourth quarter, it pushed the try to 44 yards. Christmann missed.

On a drive in the third quarter, a false start turned a third-and-1 situation into third-and-6. MSU ultimately converted, but that won’t work against stronger SEC opponents.

“Those are the things that don’t ‘get ya ‘til they get ya,’” Moorhead said. “In a game where you’re up, they get glossed over. But the same thing as last week — you can’t accept in victory what you couldn’t accept in defeat. So we’ll work to get that cleaned up.”

Substitution errors belong to coaches

As far as the substitutions go, Moorhead said those mistakes are on the coaching staff — “the thumb’s on me.” With the installation of new schemes, players and coaches have not been on the same page when it’s time to sub in and out.

MSU features many different defensive schemes. Moorhead said the substitutions have not been as clean as he’d like them to be when changing from nickel to dime packages and vice versa.

He also said it’s inexcusable to have to burn timeouts before extra point attempts because the right personnel isn’t on the field, which happened Saturday.

“We don’t need to do anything extraordinary, but we need to do the ordinary things extraordinarily well,” Moorhead said.