TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Mississippi State basketball coach Chris Jans had plenty of reason to exude emotion during his team’s 99-67 loss at Alabama on Saturday, but as the final minutes ticked away, all he could do was stand motionless.

With his hands behind his back and his body leaning toward MSU’s bench, Jans watched as starting guard Shakeel Moore found a hole in the defense and jumped for what appeared to be an easy two-handed dunk. Instead, Moore missed.

So there stood Jans, still in that same pose. Only his eyes moved as he watched the Tide (16-6, 8-1 SEC) run the other way, showing off the nation’s top scoring offense against a team ready to get on a bus heading away from Coleman Coliseum.

“From start to finish, it was an ole fashioned ass-whupping,” MSU forward Tolu Smith said postgame.

However, somewhere deep within even the most skeptical Mississippi State supporter, there is reason to think the Bulldogs (14-8, 3-6) can be an NCAA Tournament team. For better or worse, Jans said, they have been in this spot before.

Mississippi State dropped seven of its first eight SEC games last season — Jans’ first at the helm. However, the Bulldogs won five straight after that stretch and closed the regular season winning eight of 11 en route to a March Madness bid.

“Will that happen again? Who knows?” Jans said. “But I’m pretty confident that I’ve got a group of men in there that will understand that we’ve got to move on and we’ve got to process this. By Monday when we get together, we’ve got to start thinking about how we’re going to get a win in this league.”

he schedule suggests Mississippi State can follow a similar formula from last season. KenPom agrees, projecting MSU to win its next six games, starting Wednesday (8 p.m. CT, SEC Network) at home against Georgia.

Eight of MSU’s nine SEC games were Quadrant 1 battles. After a loss at Ole Miss on Tuesday, Jans said he loved the tough path. If the schedule has molded Mississippi State into a better team, even in losses, now is the chance to prove it.

“Just stay together,” guard Shawn Jones Jr. said of the team’s message moving forward. “Keep digging and we can become the team we need to become to get this job done.”

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Georgia, Missouri and Arkansas, a trio of teams helping make up the bottom half of the SEC standings, are the next three on the schedule. That’s followed by a home game against rival Ole Miss, a team MSU nearly beat on the road. Then another SEC bottom-feeder awaits at LSU. On the tail end of the projected six-game winning streak, MSU hosts a Kentucky squad that has lost three of four.

ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi dropped Mississippi State from a No. 9 seed to one of the last four teams with a bye in his Saturday night projection. If MSU elects to let the Alabama loss linger, it’ll return to familiar territory on the bubble.

But if the Bulldogs flush it and stack wins, the bubble will become a distant memory.

Stefan Krajisnik is the Mississippi State beat writer for the Clarion Ledger. Contact him at skrajisnik@gannett.com or follow him on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, @skrajisnik3.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Why Mississippi State can produce turnaround after Alabama loss