Joe Moorhead suffered his first loss as Mississippi State’s coach Saturday night, 28-7, at Kentucky.

The Bulldogs struggled to contain Kentucky running back Benny Snell Jr., who rushed for four touchdowns – two in the fourth quarter – for an upset win over the No. 14-ranked team.

The Bulldogs will return to action next week against Florida and former coach Dan Mullen.

Opening Statement…

“First and foremost, I’d like to give credit to Coach Stoops and his staff and his program. Very hard fought win and an excellent job this season, 4-0, 2-0 in the SEC. So you have to tip your cap to them. Very disappointed in our performance tonight and the first sum comes to me.

“Ultimately I’m responsible for the product put on the field. We talked all week about the things necessary for us to win this game and that was toughness, the second word was composure, third was effort and the fourth was precision and I thought we played hard and I thought we played physical. Obviously, by the number of penalties, 16 and the number of pre-possession and post-possession, those aren’t the type of things you can do to win games. Thought we did play hard and certainly in all three phases didn’t execute with the precision we needed to be a team of Kentucky’s caliber.”

On the offense line not living up to standard of the first three games, how much was UK and how much was MSU…

“I think it was a combination of both. They do a real good job with their scheme. Obviously 41 (Josh Allen) is an excellent player. The nose and both tackles are big space eaters that allow the linebackers to move around so you know we’ve got to give ourselves a chance by staying on schedule and not getting behind the sticks and I think you saw a lot of that today with false start penalties and things that didn’t put us in very manageable third down conversion distances. So I’d say it was a combination of both.”

On excessive personal penalties …

“It was a lack of composure. Certainly we corrected it from week two. We were on the right path last week but it was an emotional game. We talked in the preseason about showing out emotions without being emotional and we didn’t do that today. Again, that’s all on me and my responsibility. we’ll get it fixed.”

On getting off to a hot start …

“Hopefully, it would’ve turned out very different, get a stop on defense, get the ball back, have a positive first down play then we get a post possession personal foul, that puts us at second and extra-long and get a completion on third down becomes a longer distance to get and those things kind of trickle throughout the game.”

On vibe on the sideline when the team had a couple of chances to tie…

“I think the vibe was positive up until it hit 21-7, then 28-7. And certainly for us to operate our best offensively we need to run the ball successfully and we wouldn’t necessarily be able to do that and struggle a little bit with protection. Had some drops, had some misfires, just a combination of things that leads to the outcome we saw today.