What went well against Arizona State

TEMPE, Arizona – After Mississippi State’s season-opening win over Eastern Kentucky, coach Jeff Lebby talked about the lessons his team can learn from winning.

It was a dominant win, but Lebby knew it wasn't a perfect game and there were things the Bulldogs could have done better. However, he will have no trouble learning from Mississippi State's 30-23 loss to Arizona State.

The final score doesn't really reflect what a dominant win the Sun Devils had, but things still went well for Mississippi State.

Here we discussed what went wrong. What went right is highlighted below.

The comeback. It would have been easy for Blake Shapen and the rest of the offense to accept that Arizona State was the better team. They had every reason to give up when they were down 27 points midway through the third quarter. They couldn't run the ball, players struggled to line up properly, and Shapen barely had a free spot to stand in. But the Bulldogs didn't give up. They scored 20 points in the final 17 minutes, making things much more exciting than they should have been.

Nothing. Mississippi State's defense was able to stop some offenses and held the Sun Devils to just three points in the second half. But it's hard to call this “what went right” for the defense after it allowed 346 rushing yards, including 262 to one player, and failed to stop Arizona State on the game's final drive.

Not bad shots. There weren't many big mistakes last week, but one of them was a bad snap on a field goal attempt. It doesn't look like the snap caused Kyle Ferrie's PAT miss. Whatever caused that bad snap against EKU appears to be fixed now. (Honorable mention to Mississippi State's punt blocking unit, which nearly blocked a game-changing punt in the fourth quarter.)

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