Every Saturday, the last person to talk to Mississippi State’s football team before they board buses bound for whatever stadium they’re playing in that week, is Nick Savage. In the early afternoon of October 28 in College Station, Texas, Savage was, as usual, meeting with the entire team in the ballroom of their hotel before they played their first road game in a month.
Each week, MSU’s strength coach gives them a different a different pep talk, or “pump-up” speech, as Savage calls it. Knowing that the last two road games had both been hard losses, Savage came up with a speech he believed would help unify his team while back on the road playing against a ranked Texas A&M team in of the country’s most unique college football environments.