Blake Shapen back to work as SEC play kicks off

Last Saturday afternoon was not Blake Shapen’s best performance.

The veteran Mississippi State quarterback admitted as much postgame after the Bulldogs’ 38-10 rout of Northern Illinois. Shapen was 12-of-20 for 160 yards and a touchdown, but there were plays to be made that the QB couldn’t hit. While the win was all that mattered in the end for Shapen and the Bulldogs, he used it as a learning experience moving forward.

Shapen is off to a strong start to his final season as he’s completing 66% of his passes for 882 yards, seven touchdowns and two interceptions and he’s led them to a 4-0 start to the year. Now, SEC play begins with a bang as No. 15 Tennessee comes to town.

State’s QB spoke this week about learning from mistakes and getting better, the matchup with the Volunteers and more.

Question: Saturday night, you weren’t happy with your performance. Coach Lebby liked the fact that you weren’t satisfied. What’s the process like working through that with him and getting better?

Shapen: “Whenever you have something like that happen where you’re too fast with your progressions or you don’t have the game you want to have, you want to be able to look yourself in the mirror after the game and look at the things you can do better. That was something that I had to do. Early on in my career, that was something that I struggled with just to be able to clean up because it is hard looking yourself in the mirror at times. Just noticing that, being able to move forward and growing the things that I struggle with in the game.”

Q: Being 4-0, what have you seen from those four games that gives you confidence to win SEC games?

Shapen: “You look at the run game, the pass game – being able to push the ball down the field – I feel like those are two positives for us that are huge. As a team, our defense is playing their tail off right now so being able to rely on them is huge also. Each and every week is different and we’ve got to be able to move on. 4-0 is a great start, but we want to be able to go 1-0 this week too. For us to do that, we’ve got to be able to clean up things that we weren’t clean on Saturday.”

Q: What is your schedule after the game and going into game week?

Shapen: “After the game Saturday, I’ll watch it myself. I won’t watch it with the coaches and we won’t watch it with the coaches until Monday. I watch it by myself to see the things I need to get better at and then see if it matches up with the coaches the next day. Then being able to wipe the slate clean, being able to move on to a new week. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday; practice in the morning and then I’ll watch film. Be able to look at our gameplan because each week you get different plays and things like that so just look at the keys, things I’m reading on film and see what they’re doing defensively. That’s what a week looks like for me.”

Q: What are you seeing from Tennessee up front that causes you some concern?

Shapen: “Any team you play in this league, they’re going to be good up front. Obviously, we’ve got to be ready for that. On the secondary, I feel like they’re pretty good too. I don’t think they returned too many players from last year, but we’re expecting the same things that we saw last year. The front is definitely going to be the strong suit of their defense and it’s going to be huge to attack their secondary. Looking forward to it. Haven’t fully started watching all of them yet, but going to start doing that (Monday).”

Q: How much more confidence do you have in your team this year knowing that you could be better despite your 4-0 start?

Shapen: “It’s funny because after the game, coach Lebby was walking out and I looked at him and told him that I did not play my best game. He was like, ‘you know what the good thing is? We won 38-10 and you didn’t play your best game. Obviously, winning the game is the most important thing that you want to do, but being able to take things from that game and move forward and also understand last year we were on the wrong side of it. There’s a lot of things that we need to clean up. We’re playing good football, but like you said there’s meat on the bone. For us to clean that up, we’ve got to look ourselves on the mirror, move forward and get better.”

Q: How much different is the physicality and the talent that you see in the SEC compared to other teams?

Shapen: “That’s not something that you really look at. Obviously, it’s a known thing when you go into conference games that you’re about to be playing tougher opponents. That’s nothing that we can control. We know what we’ve got to go up against and it’s like the same that week as every other week that we’ve played. We’ve got to gameplan and know what the guys do defensively, so nothing really changes on our side of it.”

Q: What is the importance of having goals?

Shapen: “You look at our goals and right now we want to be one step closer to being bowl eligible and we want to do that as fast as possible. That’s the goal right now. We won the opener and then we won all of our non-conference games. Those are huge knowing that we do have goals in place that we can chase and try to go achieve. I feel like if you don’t have goals in place, you kind of don’t know exactly what you’re aiming for and there’s not set goal for the team. So I feel like it’s a good thing.”