Watch: Mike Leach Postgame Press Conference, LA Tech
This wasn't the way we drew it up.
Mississippi State was favored to win this game by upward of 20 points by nearly every outlet, but instead narrowly escaped a huge upset by the visiting LA Tech Bulldogs, who missed what would have been a game-winning field goal in the final two seconds of the game.
The performance from MSU obviously wasn't up to par as it slid past a team it should have beaten by a larger margin, and head coach Mike Leach wasn't unsatisfied with the insufficient effort.
Mississippi State trailed by 34-14 into the fourth quarter before Leach orchestrated the biggest comeback in school history. When asked what he said to his team in the fourth quarter, Leach had a blunt answer.
"I basically said we tried every way known to man to lose it, just for fun, let’s try something different. Let’s go ahead and do our job," Leach said. "Let’s go ahead and make it look like Wednesday’s practice, because we’ve got nothing to lose. Just do your job, do it as fast as you can and off we went. Sometimes you think there’s some anxiety going into a game, me in particular, but our coaching staff, we didn’t have them ready to play, not very well. We certainly missed a lot because the middle of that game is about as bad as you can play on all sides of the ball."
The end was good, which illustrates how good you could be if you played like that on all three sides of the ball. It was a great win. From what I understand, it’s the biggest comeback in school history. We did have contributions on offense, defense and special teams to win that game. The thing is we squandered an awful lot, and we did it early and we did it in a bad fashion. We’ve got to go back and coach better."
Watch below to hear everything Leach had to say following the victory (video credit: Mississippi State Athletics):
