The Outlook Moving Forward: Baylor

Coming off their 10-2 regular season, the Spartans travel to Dallas for the Cotton Bowl Classic and a matchup with the Baylor Bears.

Offense

Heading into the Cotton Bowl, there has not been a lot of respect for the Spartans’ 12th ranked Total Offense. If you hadn’t seen the Spartans in 2014 and just thumbed through the All-Conference and post season awards lists, you would probably presume that they were little more than an average unit, especially compared to Baylor. That is actually far from the case.

This Spartans’ Offense averaged 43.1 points per game (ranked 7th overall) and led the country in the second most important offensive stat in the game, Turnover Margin. MSU finished 2014 plus-20, which is a margin you will always win a lot of games with. In case you are visiting us from the Baylor side of the matchup, the Spartans’ Offense should be able to compete with the innovative and explosive Baylor Bears. MSU doesn’t do anything too unique or flashy, they’ve just done everything very well in 2014 and showed no signs of holding a bag of fool’s gold.

Offenses tend to improve more and perform better in Bowl Games than Defenses do. We’ve already seen evidence of that trend during the first part of Bowl Season, and it would be wise to expect more shootouts from here. If the Spartans pick up where they left off towards the end of the regular season, they should catch the Baylor crowd off guard and gain confidence as the game goes on. They know they have to keep up with the Baylor Offense that is expected to put up a whole lot of points.

In order for MSU to have a realistic shot of wining the Cotton Bowl on the road, the Offense will need to produce at least five scores worth of points. That’s more than 41-points, to be precise. But in reality they may need to pass 50 to beat Baylor on their home Texas turf. The Bears averaged 48.8 points per game this year from their Offense, though as we will discuss on the other side of the ball, have not faced the caliber of the Spartans’ Defense.

The top ranked Total Defense out of the Big 12 in 2014 was Texas, who rank 24th. Baylor sits at 40th, and 39th in Scoring Defense, giving up an average of 24.2 per game. None of those numbers will help ease the pressure that Connor Cook and this unit are under. They haven’t been needed to score like this since the Oregon game in early September. Before that one, MSU knew it was going to take north of 40-points to clip the Ducks on the road, but had 10 regular season games left to play regardless of the outcome. Baylor is it for this Offense and the Spartans as a team.

It’s good that MSU has had extra time and practices to tune this unit up to perform at their very best for the Cotton Bowl, but that was also time for the pressure to begin to mount. If MSU comes out looking tight, on the road, it would not be that big a surprise. If the Offense struggles mightily or fails to ever get going for the game, it would be quite an awful surprise because they have been very consistent all season.

Baylor ranks 9th in Rushing Defense coming into the game, allowing an average of 107.7 yards. That tells us they’ve struggled most to defend the pass. So MSU may need to throw the ball more on 1st and 2nd Down than they have against weaker opponents. A Cotton Bowl Classic with a single digit final ranking on the line is not the time to get overly stubborn and force the run first over and over. If they do, the Offense could quickly sputter out and MSU could end up falling too far behind early to ever have a good shot at a win. But if the Spartans can achieve the level of balance they desire and have achieved during the best offensive output under Mark Dantonio, MSU should score a bunch of points too.

Defense

Baylor has the top ranked Total Offense in College Football right now. They average 581.3 yards per game and 48.8 points per game. Since Art Briles took over in Waco, the Baylor Bears have arrived to the national scene in College Football as a high powered offensive machine. It wasn’t long before then that most never thought we would hear of Baylor in national championship contention again. With the combination of Briles and a brand new on-campus stadium, Baylor Football will be around on the big stage for a while, continuing to be known for an innovative and effective Offense.

The Bears’ attack is led by Bryce Petty, a Senior who threw 20 more Touchdowns than Interceptions in 2014 (26 to 6). And, he was only sacked 19 times in 377 passing attempts, so Baylor’s game plan not only piles on the points, it seems to limit the risk of game changing defensive plays popping up to spoil the day. Since the Spartans have already given up a bunch of big plays in 2014, many expect a very big output from the Baylor attack in the Cotton Bowl. As if the challenge of Baylor was not enough, MSU has prepared for the task with an unsettled Defensive Coaching Staff.

Pat Narduzzi will finish his Spartan career with the Cotton Bowl on January 1st and essentially take over at Pitt on January 2nd. No matter how smooth the hiring process might have been, it is a significant distraction anytime a Defensive Coordinator is in the process of interviewing and agreeing to accept a job as a Head Coach. It also plants a seed of uncertainty about whether any position Coaches will leave for that new destination, and even threatens to disrupt the recruiting process as well. All of that adds up to distraction. While the Cotton Bowl is more about the players than the Coaches, remember how badly a similar situation played out after the 2010 season when MSU went up against Alabama in the Citrus Bowl.

MSU will need the best from Narduzzi and all of the Defense to slow down the explosive Baylor attack. Mark Dantonio and company look even wiser now for working in Tony Lippett at Corner Back during the last regular season games of the season. Lippett could play a serious role in the Cotton Bowl because of the depth Baylor features in their spread out high speed attacks. Tackling in space should once again be at a premium because Baylor likes to get the ball to skill position players in space, but be sure to keep an eye on the battle up front.

While everyone knows that it always starts up front, it’s a different battle if you’re talking about a team that’s regularly hiking the ball to a Quarterback in the shotgun and getting rid of it so quickly. It will be a different battle up front for MSU, but one that the Defensive Line should really “get up” for because they can make a serious impact in the outcome. If a pass rush can get going from the MSU front, Baylor could struggle to find a rhythm. As is always the case for the best high-tempo Offenses, Baylor’s Offense thrives on finding its rhythm.

MSU sports the 4th rated Passing Efficiency Defense, a stat that measures how difficult it is to move the ball through the air against a Defense, but that doesn’t automatically mean Baylor will struggle to move the ball through the air. If the Spartans can’t find a way to consistently affect the Quarterback with the front four, they will have to blitz and face more exposure in the secondary. The more MSU is forced to blitz, the more likely Baylor will have a shot to connect on big plays. That’s the difference the front four can make for MSU on the road in Dallas.

Bowl Games tend to make Defenses look a bit rusty and a lot of teams seriously struggle to tackle well. The Spartans cannot afford to tackle poorly in the Cotton Bowl because Baylor is long on speed and has a number of players that can take it to the house on any given play. MSU has given up a lot of big plays in 2014 and Baylor has made a lot of big plays in 2014. That’s a scary combination for Spartan Nation.

Expect Baylor to pull off a handful of chunk plays, but the closer that number stays to just a handful, the more likely the Spartans will be in position to pull off another major victory on the road. If Baylor ends up with closer to 10 big plays for the day, watch out for an extraordinary number of points out of the Bears.

The Citrus Bowl against Alabama ended up being an awful exit for the Spartans’ Offensive Coordinator, Don Treadwell. Playing Baylor on the road is already a scary sounding setup for Pat Narduzzi’s Defense, but now we know it will be his final chapter as a Defensive Coordinator in Green and White. Hopefully the result will be the complete opposite of the face plant Treadwell’s unit experienced in Orlando that New Year’s Day, but it will take a collective and organized effort from the Spartan Defense to make that happen. Baylor can make a Defense look lost when it appears to have everything going for it coming into the game. Anything but the Spartans’ best for the Cotton Bowl could leave a very humbling result.

Special Teams

When you’re expecting a shootout, you don’t expect Special Teams to play much of a role in the final outcome. MSU-Baylor looks like it could be the first to 40, if not 50. You don’t get up to those totals by kicking a bunch of Field Goals. But hopefully the break between the Regular and Bowl season has done Michael Geiger well. Geiger came off a nearly perfect 2013 and struggled significantly during points of 2014. He appears to have turned the corner, and should find a friendly surface inside the Jerry Jones Dome that the Cotton Bowl Classic will be played at this time around.

Can Mike Sadler hit the largest television screen in the world with a punt? Maybe in practice he’ll bounce a couple off the 60-yard Mitsubishi that hangs above the playing surface in Dallas. Hopefully his services won’t be needed much in a Cotton Bowl that MSU knows it needs to score a lot of points in. If they are needed, given the proficiency of the Baylor Offense, Sadler must step up and place the ball with precision each punt. He has not had the Senior year once hoped for and did not end up with an All-American shot during his last season, but should be inspired to leave a truly outstanding Spartan career on a very high note.

While Special Teams should not mean much in a game that may push 100-points total, it goes without saying that a turnover by either of these units could change the tide. With high scoring Offenses on both sides, neither team wants to open the door to a momentum swing that could flip the entire game. It may be more about the mistakes that are not made by the Special Teams units than the plays that these units make.

Overall

When this matchup was first announced, it took Spartan Nation by great surprise. After the haze cleared from the stunned group, and many assumed a rankings shuffle was orchestrated by the Big Ten to get Illinois into a Bowl, the Cotton Bowl reality started to set in. MSU is playing a road game against a very prolific and motivated bunch of Baylor Bears. While that was far from a fair set of cards that were dealt to MSU, the upside of winning a road Bowl Game against a Top-10 opponent is undeniable. The winner of the Cotton Bowl Classic should be no lower than the 5th ranked team in College Football’s final 2014 rankings, and maybe end up as high as 3rd.

It looks like we have a shoot out in waiting for us on New Year’s Day in Dallas. Both Offenses can score, the Spartans the more traditional looking-plodding bunch, the Bears the more up-tempo and flashy group. With Defenses traditionally not travelling as well to Bowls and Baylor practically playing a home game, on paper it looks like Baylor will have the edge on MSU from the start, probably get out ahead a couple of scores, and then do enough to stay ahead from there. That’s what many experts are predicting at this point, and what’s been predicted to happen to MSU over most of their biggest games of the Dantonio era. Fortunately those predictions have been proven wrong more often than not.

Mark Dantonio has pointed to Time of Possession since he’s returned to Michigan State. This year the Spartans ranked 1st in the country for the regular season, which is an awful nice compliment to being at the top in Turnover Margin as well. While some consider Time of Possession an overrated stat (Rich Rodriguez for example), it is certainly worth a follow as the Cotton Bowl progresses. It’s hard to imagine an MSU victory if that number is anywhere near even, or even in Baylor’s favor. The Spartans Offensive Line and MSU’s ability to effectively run the ball will be under a close focus from the first series of the day.

On the other side of the coin, the Bears’ big play ability will be what many casual fans will tune in for. The average fan has been told this game is about a defensive powerhouse and its ability to keep up with one of the cutting edge offensive attacks in the game right now. That script calls for Baylor to hang 60 or so on MSU, sending Pat Narduzzi out on a sour note, and for the MSU Offense to look sluggish and too slow to keep up with the Big 12’s best. When you look at how MSU ended up in this road Bowl Game to begin with, you can understand why it’s being laid out that way by many “experts.”

But they write newspapers and blogs for a reason, and play the games out to determine the actual truth. If MSU has taken a true “road game” approach to preparing for this Cotton Bowl, and the impending Coaching Staff changes have not been too big a distraction, the Spartans might take Baylor by surprise early on and keep it very interesting from there. This is a very good Michigan State team looking for a 2014 signature win on the road in a major Bowl Game against a one-loss opponent.

On the Baylor side of the coin, the upstart Bears are understandably miffed that they were left out of the Playoff having only one-loss, but have been given a decent consolation prize of essentially hosting a big time Bowl Game. That environment should favor their ability to get into a rhythm on Offense and start to pile up the points early before pulling away for good and making their final argument that they should have been a part of the inaugural College Football Playoff.

The winner of the Cotton Bowl will take home a very meaningful trophy from a Bowl Game that is stocked quite deep with history. They will also have earned a season’s final ranking inside the Top-9, aka single digits, which will set the winner up for a major run come 2015. MSU has not had back to back Top-10, let alone Top-5 seasons in a very long time. That motivation alone should produce the Spartans’ best effort of the year, which would cap off a very fine 2014 season and set MSU up for 2015 and its best look at National Championship in many, many years.

P.A.T. (Perhaps Another Thought…)

1. The Spartans earned an Orange or maybe Peach Bowl bid but ended up in the Cotton? At first it didn’t make sense, but then word broke that MSU needed to mysteriously fall in the rankings so Illinois would not be left out of a Bowl. If that sounds odd, it is. But it sure looks like the Spartans were sacrificed by the Big Ten so the bowl-eligible Illini would not be left in Champaign without a game. It looks like it meant more to the Big Ten that Illinois, a program that hasn’t won more than 7-games in a season since a Rose Bowl trip in 2008, be placed in a low level Bowl Game than setting up one of the league’s top programs in the best position to win a major Bowl Game. I have a hard time believing Spartan Football will forget how the Big Ten jobbed them, again, and I doubt that most fans of Spartan Nation will either. It doesn’t matter that the Big Ten and Illinois were terribly embarrassed by the Illini’s loss to Louisiana Tech in that also-ran Bowl Game, the public perception is formed first and foremost by how the big boy programs of the Big Ten do in the major Bowl Games. Someone get a clue up there in Chicago and start making decisions to put the Big Ten’s better programs in their best positions to succeed, not in road Bowl Games when they’ve clearly deserved a better fate.
2. The College Football Playoff can be expanded to 11 teams next year without much of an adjustment to the post season schedule. Conference Title Game’s should be turned into play-in games, and the Big 12 Conference forced to either expand or come up with a Championship Game for 2015. Outside of the ESPN coined “Power 5,” the Playoff could add one at-large team from completely outside of those five leagues. So no Conference Champion would earn a shot to play for a National Title. Keep in mind that in-game attendance is secondary concern to what has become a television audience driven sport. Of course, ESPN airs the entire College Football Playoff. Year one has been a relatively unmitigated disaster, so clean up this mess, College Football, before the stain sets in and becomes permanent on the greatest team sport that exists.
3. The Cotton Bowl Classic has lost some of its luster and traditional feel because it’s no longer played in the recently renovated Cotton Bowl.
4. Camera Operators are the most underrated and underpaid difference makers in major American Football. If you think about the value of an instant replay, what do you have if the camera doesn’t capture the right action? What if the camera man cuts off the frame just a fraction, or doesn’t have the ideal angle to make the correct call? It’s astonishing how determinative their work has become, and it surprises me year after year that they are still not accompanied by a truly Off-Field Official to oversee and expedite the replay process. We should not overlook or take for granted the work of the camera man when it comes to the crunch time football that is played after November 1st. During the Bowl season and coming NFL Playoffs there will be an enormous replay that basically decides between the winners and losers, and there will probably be very little attention paid to the importance of the camera work.