What the EA Sports simulation says about Mississippi State vs. Florida

Before the Bulldogs face the Gators, see how EA College Football 26 predicts the game will unfold.

Mississippi State Bulldogs cornerback Kelley Jones (1) and safety Tony Mitchell (9) celebrate a stop on fourth and one in the second quarter against the Texas A&M Aggies at Kyle Field. | Maria Lysaker-Imagn Images

The odds improved much for Mississippi State this weekend.

Florida still remains the clear favorite. FanDuel Sportsbook has the Gators as a 9.5-point favorite and SP+ Projections favor the gators’ winning by 2.6 points.

The Bulldogs won’t get any help from Mother Nature, either.

There is some good news in the latest Student-Athlete Availability Report with safety Isaac Smith and offensive lineman Albert Reese IV upgraded to probable for Saturday’s game.

But even with that morsel of good news, Mississippi State fans won’t find many predictions or projections favoring their Bulldogs.

Here’s one though:

We continued our season-long simulation of Mississippi State’s games after a break last week. In our simulated games, the Bulldogs are 5-1 with the only loss to Texas A&M.

After this week, the virtual Bulldogs are 6-1.

As a reminder, we run this simulation on Heisman difficulty and no rosters or depth charts have been edited. We also set the game time as close to the real life scheduled time and give the game clear weather conditions (unless there's a strong likelihood of inclement weather in the real life game). Neither team has a user controlling them and we only run this simulation once.

Mississippi State wins the EA College Football 26 game 7-6 over the Gators. The Bulldogs led 7-3 at halftime and the only second half points scored were a Florida field goal in the fourth quarter.

Blake Shapen had a strong showing with just one incompletion and the game’s only touchdown. Florida’s DJ Lagway wasn’t the version of himself that played LSU, but he wasn’t great.

Mississippi State’s defense was great, though, and lived by the bend-but-don’t-break mentality and it worked.

What Can We Learn From This?

The big lesson is that Saturday’s game could be very close.

Without spoiling my official prediction column later today, there are some things Mississippi State is good at and a lot of those things happen to line up with what Florida likes to do.

For example, the Bulldogs’ pass defense is 25th in the nation in yards allowed per game and fourth in the SEC. Florida is more of a passing team (227.3 yards per game) than a running (120.8 ypg) one.

It’s things like that should make a lot of people pause and take a moment to really think if Florida should actually be the favorite.

Because if this game was in Starkville or a neutral site, that point spread would be a lot smaller.