A balanced offense worked against Kentucky — should MSU keep running?
STARKVILLE — Mike Leach has heard the criticism that follows his pass-heavy offense.
The Mississippi State football coach throws the ball too much, some might say. The Bulldogs — or whichever team Leach is coaching at the time — should actually sling the ball more, others might remark.
“At some point in time, someone is bitching about something,” Leach said Monday. “They either want you to throw it more or run it more.”
So Leach offered an extreme solution to the perceived problem of an unbalanced offense.
“I've actually thought about running it virtually 100% of the time one game, throwing it 100% the next game — with my luck some punter will drop the damn ball so it'll count as a rush — and then brag about how balanced we are, tell everybody we're balanced,” Leach said, before nixing his own tongue-incheek suggestion. “There's nothing balanced about that. Balanced has to do with production by position.”
Leach joked, but Mississippi State's balanced offense against Kentucky looked as good as it has all season. The Bulldogs ran 31 designed running plays — 10 more than the next closest, with 21 designed runs against LSU.
The 35 runs overall (a statistic that includes sacks and scrambles) were the most runs Leach's offense has attempted since he arrived in Starkville in 2020. That's also the fourth-highest total from a Leach-coached team in his career.
And it worked. Especially in the red zone, where the Bulldogs (5-3, 3-2 SEC) have stagnated at times, unable to find the short passes and yards after the catch that got them into that position because of the compressed defense.
Quarterback Will Rogers handed the ball off three times in the red zone. Three times a running back pounded the ball in — twice from Dillon Johnson and once from Jo'quavious Marks. It was the first time Mississippi State scored three rushing touchdowns in a game under Leach.
“The better you are on the O-line, the better your running backs are, and the better your quarterback is at transitioning between different things and different sets, and the stronger it's going to be,” Leach said. “But the idea isn't, ‘Oh, we get to run, we're gonna run it all the time.' I mean, there's a point you're going to have to make choices what you're going to do and how you're going to move the football.”
It could help the offense against Arkansas (5-3, 1-3) on Saturday (3 p.m., SEC Network) and beyond — a wrinkle in a pass-heavy scheme that forces defenses to consider another path down the field.
Most of the time, Leach will opt to throw. The screens and running back dump-off passes often take the role of running plays. When down heavily against Alabama, Mississippi State ran just 10 designed runs, according to Pro Football Focus, the fewest this season.
But the Bulldogs were as balanced as they've ever been under Leach on Saturday, with 31 runs compared to 43 dropbacks from Rogers — picking up 106 yards (excluding sacks) to the 344 through the air.
When Kentucky dropped back large numbers of defenders in coverage, establishing the run opened the passing game for Rogers. It's not the first time Mississippi State has faced the dropeight zone the Wildcats displayed, and it won't be the last. Johnson and Marks, though, threw a wrench in the plan with their production.
Leach said the offensive line's improvement helped spring those runs, but the ability for Johnson and Marks to gain yards after contact — averaging 2.03 yards between them — helped make the most of those carries.
“O-line did their job, everybody's bringing their best stuff,” Marks said Saturday. “If the running game is working, we're not going to stop running.”