If you missed the big news out of Starkville on Friday, Joe Moorhead is out as head coach at Mississippi State.

Now the search begins for the next Hail State coach and one interesting name that’s been getting tossed around is longtime New England Patriots assistant coach Joe Judge. The Mississippi State alum has served under Bill Belichick’s New England staff for eight seasons and was the Patriots’ special teams coordinator and receivers coach in 2019.

According to a source of Bruce Feldman’s of The Athletic, Judge has “always wanted” the Mississippi State job and has some support locally for the job.

If this is where Mississippi State wants to go for its next coach, school leaders may have to act quickly as the New York Giants have reportedly been given permission to interview Judge for their head coaching position, according to Boston.com.

Interestingly, Judge is currently in the process of getting his Ph.D. from Mississippi State. That process began back in 2005, when he was an assistant coach in Starkville. Judge also has college experience working at Alabama under Nick Saban.

“To me, coaching has always been teaching. I worked for a guy a while back who told me that teaching is just to inspire learning. To me, learning different methods of teaching is the biggest thing,” Judge said to Patriots.com in November. “There is no one way to teach. Everybody learns differently, and you have to really learn who the class is, who the students are, so you can reach everybody. You can’t teach to the highest in the classroom, and if you only teach to the lowest in the classroom, you’re going to miss others. You have to find ways to teach to the entire spectrum at the same time through different methods and keep everybody engaged.”