He spoke about facility upgrades if you wanted to listen.
https://outofboundsshow.podbean.com/e/august-23-2021-john-cohen/
https://outofboundsshow.podbean.com/e/august-23-2021-john-cohen/
Out of Bounds interviewed John Cohen...
- Thread starter dawgstudent
- Start date
Interesting interview.
I get the impression..... there will be an addition to premium seating in the south before the West side is renovated.
Regarding the other thread, text group discussion of Cohen's future if........ Leach isn't going anywhere for years, regardless. Bo calls MSU football a rebuild for Leach. Cohen agrees. My impression, Leach will be given the MSU standard of 4-5 years.
I get the impression..... there will be an addition to premium seating in the south before the West side is renovated.
Regarding the other thread, text group discussion of Cohen's future if........ Leach isn't going anywhere for years, regardless. Bo calls MSU football a rebuild for Leach. Cohen agrees. My impression, Leach will be given the MSU standard of 4-5 years.
Not disagreeing with you. However, I don't like the narrative that Bo is repeating....."rebuild". I don't buy that either but......seems like a message is being sent to the listeners.
However, we could win 6-8 games and this discussion is pointless.
Agree, it's only a rebuild because Cohen decided he wanted to sell out on a passing offense, which is why he hired Sloppy Joe in the first place. If anything, Sloppy gave Leach a leg up in the transition because he did the dirty work for 2 years. Leach should send Slophead a thank-you note.
Leach gets 2022 at minimum. I think he wins at the same level as Mullen and he retires here, but even if Leach is a disaster he is getting 3 years and last season may have been seen as “year 0.”
And is exactly why you can't totally change offensive schemes every 2 years which is what we have done going from Mullen to Moorhead to Leach. People don't have the patience to sit through miserable football waiting for a coach to get his style players into the fold.
I'll always be grateful to those 2018 guys (Fitzgerald, Simmons, Sweat, etc.) for giving us a great football season even in the midst of Cohen's hardheadness and Sloppy's incompetence. Yeah we lost to Florida and Iowa, but an 8 win season, with wins over Auburn, Texas A&M and a blowout of Arkansas and Ole Miss (in Oxford), should never be taken lightly. Especially in the face of all the crap we had to endure that year. It was literally ALL on the players to get that done.
He will get 5 years minimum given the first year was a COVID mulligan. We just can't go through another coaching turnover quickly. If we take the time to go air raid for a few years, to then go to anything else would be ANOTHER major transition which would be a disaster at this point. We have to stick with something for a while and hope it eventually works out.
If Leech wins 5-6 this year and 6-7 next year, he'll need to win 8 in 2023 to not be on the hot seat. If he can win 8 consistently and only dip to a 6-6 type record every 4 years or so, he'll be here as long he wants. If he only wins 4-5 this year and next year, His seat will be burning going into 2023 (if he makes it that long).
I mean how nuanced do you really want to get? He didn't win enough, as compared to expectations, that's for sure. And if you are saying the fight was what put it over the edge in year 2, sure, but he was getting fired in year 3 once he went 1-9 last year. Trend was bad, inmates running asylum, etc.....but we were also losing more than we should have. Should have been 10-2 in 2018 and 8-4 in 2019. Do that and nobody cares about the rest.
There's no doubt that he should have won more. But he didn't get fired for that. He got fired for letting the culture in the locker room go to ****. The fight and the skipped bowl practices essentially forced Cohen's hand.
ETA: I don't disagree that it would have been really bad in year three. Something had to be done there. But circumstances accelerated the timeline.
Last edited:
Leach is going to be here for a while, no matter what the record ends up being this year (or next, IMO). You don't go get a guy that is so philosophically different from anything ever done at Mississippi State, and then not give him plenty of time to build the program the way he wants.
We fired Moorhead after two seasons because he looked incompetent.
I think if the team is showing steady improvement, you can still get a four year leash. Leach I think could win 5 games this year and 6 games next year and still get a fourth year if we looked competitive in our losses next year. There wouldn't be a lot of patience at that point, but I think he could survive to year four if he did that .
Prior to the summer, I was reasonably confident that 6 would be the absolute floor, but I am not high at all on our air raid offense right now that was 104th in the country last year. Based on everything I'm hearing, either A) Arnett's defense has made the jump from pretty good to Top 25 or B) the air raid is going struggle
If we put up 50 against La Tech, I'll immediately feel a lot better, but right now I'm not feeling too hot about our chances
If we put up 50 against La Tech, I'll immediately feel a lot better, but right now I'm not feeling too hot about our chances
You need to look beyond the conventional stats for 2020. We very much had a Top 25 defense last year, and an offense that was better than 104th too. You can’t look at the final finish in the national statistical standings when there was such a schedule disparity between conferences, and with us playing 10 SEC games and no one else. The top 14 toughest schedules in the country were the 14 SEC schools….by far.
Take defense for example. We finished 58th nationally in scoring defense, but were still Top 6 in the SEC. A top 6 SEC defense is a Top 25 defense nationally in just about any normal year.
So 15 was enough for him to get Year 3? He finished just one shy of the minimum due to the MCB loss? Come on man. We absolutely fired his *** due to the **** show of off the field incidents leading up to the bowl game. That was the last straw. If he was fired purely for not winning enough, it would have happened right after the Egg Bowl. That combined with tutor gate as well as looking completely unprepared in half the 2019 games is why he was fired. If any one of those things doesn’t happen, he gets a 3rd year.
Last edited:
Over the Costello stretch of games, absolutely. But we didn’t suck from start to finish by any means. 27 ppg over the 5 games that Rogers started in the 2nd half of the season. That would have been tied with Mizzou for 7th in the SEC if applied over a full season.
Last edited:
We have seen a lot of highs and lows in the last decade of MSU football, but one thing that we should never have is another losing season. Enough of that BS. If we can't even accomplish a winning season consistently then it not worth it to me.
Yes, but stat lines like what we saw against Vandy do not spark confidence. Will was 35-46 for a paltry 226 yards. We rushed for negative yardage. 30 of 51 for 221 against Auburn. And this was in a passing offense with ZERO run game. It's plain pitiful. And it can't be like that again this year. If so, then either Will or this offense or both aren't the answer. Then we start year 3 with ANOTHER green, young QB and who knows what the results are. There HAS to be improvement this year. Those stat lines just can't happen.
It was a true 17ing freshmen’s first SEC start in a year with no spring practice and other true 17ing freshmen at every single offensive skill position. And oh yeah, we still scored 24 and won the ballgame. But by all means, let’s treat that game as the ceiling for the offense.
And of course there has to be improvement this year, but there was improvement last year already just from Game 1 to Game 5 for the Will Rogers offense. Yes, we’re still going to struggle against elite defenses like Bama / Auburn, etc., just like we always have. The 10 points against Auburn was the same type of output we saw in Year 9 of Mullen against those types of defenses.
Last edited:
I don't care. He was our option at the time. You CAN NOT throw 50+ times for less than 250-300 yards and have that be your only source of offense. We were flat out lucky to beat Vandy with that pitiful stat line.
We were definitely lucky to beat Vandy. We should have lost that game if not for their total ineptness, and the fact that our defense was pretty good.
The Auburn game was ugly, but aside from that, the offense did improve over the second half of the year. While I don't expect us to score 40 ppg, I do expect the offense to be much better, given a better o-line, an upgrade in talent at the skill position, and a full spring/summer and fall camp. And given the fact that our defense is goin to be salty this year, just a little bit of improvement by the offense can be the difference between six wins and eight wins.
I went to the spring game and had the wool sheared because we didn't look very good offensively. But last year's offensive numbers were historically bad for a Leach offense, and I'm really not interested in hearing about how the offense won't work in the SEC, given that it's worked in the past, and that defensive dominance in the SEC is overstated. Just a marginal move toward the mean for production in a Leach offense will make a big difference.
I'm firmly in the 7-5 or 8-4 camp. I think our defense is going to win some games, and marginal improvement from our offense is going to help us in toss-ups. We won't win all of them against Kentucky, Arkansas, Auburn, LSU, or Ole Miss, but I don't think getting at least two of them is a stretch.
Considering no spring practice to speak of and a true freshman playing QB plus a few other true freshmen starting I think the offense was pretty impressive over the last 4 or 5 games. The defense was pretty good other than safety play which cost us a lot of yardage. I could see this offense being 7 points a game better and the D also being 7 points better. That would have won a few more games such as Georgia and OM. If you couldn't be happy with that you probly need to switch teams or learn to enjoy being disappointed
Who the 17 are you arguing with? Nobody thinks that stat line is acceptable over the long haul. That still doesn’t mean it’s not understandable for that particular game, given the context. There is no reason for anyone’s panties to still be in a wad about it given the improvement that we saw in the next 4 games.
2018 was the most frustrating football season I’ve witnessed. Any decent coach should’ve won 10+ games with the talent we had. There was nothing “great” about that year.
I'm definitely not in that the offense won't work camp. And I am also one that believes in Leach. But, like you said, the spring game showing was concerning.
My whole point with all this was it just HAS to be better. I'm hopeful that Marks and Johnson plus the Oline are vastly improved and we can move the ball. If it is, we should be much improved. If it is not, and that is a product of the type of offense then we CAN NOT have 50 pass attempts for 200 yards and succeed. THAT was my point.
Latest
-
01
Maroon and White Football
SEC Defensive Lineman of the Week Amaree Williams and Mississippi State Defense just getting started
-
02
On3 Football
Kamario Taylor, Trinidad Chambliss turning the state of Mississippi into quarterback nirvana
-
03
Maroon and White Football
Mississippi State WR Zion Ragins speaks on rapid Bulldogs offense
-
04
Maroon and White Football
Points of Focus from Mississippi State HC Jeff Lebby heading into Week 4
-
05
Maroon and White Football
Mississippi State DL Diesel Moye and Trevion Williams to miss rest of 2026 season with injuries