Middle Tennessee State football, after a week off, will delve back into Conference USA play for the rest of the season beginning with a midweek contest.

The Blue Raiders (1-4, 0-1 CUSA) will try to snap a four-game losing streak and earn their first conference win when they play at Louisiana Tech Thursday (7 p.m., CBS Sports Networks).

MTSU is coming off a 24-7 loss at Memphis. Louisiana Tech (1-3, 0-1) has lost three in a row after a Week 1 victory over Nicholls. The Bulldogs dropped a 17-10 decision to Florida International during Week 5.

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Below is a scouting report on the matchup, including a score prediction by The Daily News Journal’s Cecil Joyce:

Louisiana Tech football has relied on its defense in 2024

Despite a 1-3 to start, Louisiana Tech has played good defense this season. The Bulldogs are allowing an average of less than 300 yards total offense per game.

The Bulldogs have been particularly tough against the pass, where they’ve allowed only 198 yards per game. That will test an MTSU offense whose strength has been its passing game — 265 yards per game — behind redshirt junior Nick Vattiato.

MTSU may also turn to its running game, though it’s averaging only 80 yards per game, a little more against the Bulldogs. With starter Frank Peasant out because of an injury, junior Jaiden Credle has carried a bulk of the load. He rushed 10 times for 39 yards in the loss to Memphis after gaining 125 yards and a touchdown in a homecoming loss to Duke.

Credle has 49 rushes for 233 yards and two TDs on the season.

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MTSU passing duo clicking on all cylinders

One of the bright spots during the current losing streak has been the play of Vattiato and his top receiver, junior Auburn transfer Omari Kelly. The duo has heated up over recent games.

Kelly has a team-leading 24 receptions for 471 yards with three touchdowns, and most of that production has come over the past three games.

Wrapped around a four-catch, 12-yard performance against Duke, Kelly totaled 15 receptions, 413 yards and three TDs against Western Kentucky and Memphis.

Vattiato is 107 of 163 for 1,285 yards with five touchdowns and four interceptions.

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Louisiana Tech offense also likes to air it out

Like MTSU, Louisiana Tech has succeeded more with its passing game than running game, averaging just 100 yards rushing per contest. That comes despite a starting offensive line of all fourth-year players.

The team’s leading rusher is 6-foot-1, 210-pound senior Donerio Davenport. The McComb, Mississippi, product has 31 carries for 107 yards with one touchdown. The second-leading rusher has just 65 yards.

Unlike the Blue Raiders, the Bulldogs have rotated starting quarterbacks.

Redshirt junior Jack Turner, the team’s Week 1 starter, injured a knee injury in that game and missed Week 2 before coming back to throw for 314 yards and a TD (but also three interceptions) in a loss to North Carolina State. He was then pulled in the fourth quarter of Tech’s Week 4 loss to Tulsa after completing 7 of 14 passes for just 41 yards.

Redshirt freshman Evan Bullock got the start the next week against FIU, completing 26 of 37 passes for 218 yards with no touchdowns or interceptions. Redshirt freshman Blake Baker replaced Turner in both Week 1 and Week 4. He is 18 of 34 passing for 314 yards with a TD and three interceptions.

MTSU score prediction vs. Louisiana Tech

MTSU 24, Louisiana Tech 17. The Blue Raiders get their first CUSA win in the Derek Mason era, snapping a losing streak along the way. An improving MTSU defense exploits the Bulldogs’ issues behind center.

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Cecil Joyce covers high school sports and MTSU athletics for The Daily News Journal. Contact him at cjoyce@dnj.com and follow him on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, @Cecil_Joyce.

From left, Myrtle Felton, Sharon Lavigne, Gail LeBoeuf and Rita Cooper conduct a livestream video on property owned by Formosa on March 11, 2020, in St. James Parish, La. LeBoeuf, a co-founder of Inclusive Louisiana, has liver cancer, which she acknowledged can’t be traced back to petrochemical plant pollution with certainty, but said it can’t be ruled out either. Gerald Herbert/Associated Press file

NEW ORLEANS — A federal appellate court is set to hear oral arguments Monday in a civil rights lawsuit alleging a south Louisiana parish engaged in racist land-use policies to place polluting industries in majority-Black communities.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans is reviewing a lawsuit filed by community groups claiming St. James Parish “intentionally discriminated against Black residents” by encouraging industrial facilities to be built in areas with predominantly Black populations “while explicitly sparing white residents from the risk of environmental harm.”

The groups, Inclusive Louisiana, Rise St. James and Mt. Triumph Baptist Church, seek a halt to future industrial development in the parish.

The plaintiffs note that 20 of the 24 industrial facilities were in two sections of the parish with majority-Black populations when they filed the complaint in March 2023.

The parish is located along a heavily industrialized stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, known as the Chemical Corridor, often referred to by environmental groups as “Cancer Alley” because of the high levels of suspected cancer-causing pollution emitted there.

The lawsuit comes as the federal government has taken steps during the Biden administration to address the legacy of environmental racism. Federal officials have written stricter environmental protections and committed tens of billions of dollars in funding.

In the Louisiana case, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier of the Eastern District of Louisiana in November 2023 dismissed the lawsuit largely on procedural grounds, ruling the plaintiffs had filed their complaint too late. But he added, “this Court cannot say that their claims lack a basis in fact or rely on a meritless legal theory.”

Barbier said the lawsuit hinged primarily on the parish’s 2014 land-use plan, which generally shielded white neighborhoods from industrial development and left majority-Black neighborhoods, schools and churches without the same protections. The plan also described largely Black sections of the parish as “future industrial” sites. The plaintiffs missed the legal window to sue the parish, the judge ruled.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan stands near the Marathon Petroleum Refinery as he tours neighborhoods that abut the refinery, in Reserve, La., on Nov. 16, 2021. A lawsuit filed by residents of a Louisiana parish located in the heart of a cluster of polluting petrochemical factories raises allegations of civil rights, environmental justice and religious liberty violations. Gerald Herbert/Associated Press file

Yet the parish’s land-use plan is just one piece of evidence among many revealing ongoing discrimination against Black residents in the parish, said Pamela Spees, a lawyer for the Center of Constitutional Rights representing the plaintiffs. They are challenging Barbier’s ruling under the “continuing violations” doctrine on the grounds that discriminatory parish governance persists, allowing for industrial expansion in primarily Black areas.

The lawsuit highlights the parish’s decision in August 2022 to impose a moratorium on large solar complexes after a proposed 3,900-acre solar project upset residents of the mostly white neighborhood of Vacherie, who expressed concerns about lowering property values and debris from storms. The parish did not take up a request for a moratorium on heavy industrial expansion raised by the plaintiffs, the lawsuit states.

These community members “have tried at every turn to simply have their humanity and dignity be seen and acknowledged,” Spees said. “That’s just been completely disregarded by the local government and has been for generations.”

Another part of the complaint argues the parish failed to identify and protect the likely hundreds of burial sites of enslaved people by allowing industrial facilities to build on and limit access to the areas, preventing the descendants of slaves from memorializing the sites. The federal judge tossed out that part of the lawsuit, noting the sites were on private property not owned by the parish.

At its core, the complaint alleges civil rights violations under the 13th and 14th amendments, stating the land-use system in the parish allowing for industrial buildout primarily in majority-Black communities remains shaped by the history of slavery, white supremacy and Jim Crow laws and governance.

Lawyers for St. James Parish said the lawsuit employed overreaching claims and “inflammatory rhetoric.” St. James Parish did not respond to a request for comment.

“The Civil War ain’t never been over,” said lifelong St. James Parish resident Gail LeBoeuf, 72, a plaintiff in the case who co-founded the local environmental justice organization Inclusive Louisiana. “They’re trying to destroy the Black people in this country in any way they can.”

LeBoeuf, who lives 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) from an alumina plant, was diagnosed with cancer in 2022 and blames her illness on the high levels of industrial pollution she has been exposed to for decades. She acknowledges the link cannot be proven but counters there is no way to prove industrial pollution was not the reason.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found in a 2003 report that St. James Parish ranked higher than the national average for certain cancer deaths. In August, a federal judge barred the EPA from using the Civil Rights Act to fight industrial pollution alleged to have disproportionately affected minority communities in Louisiana.

Besides a moratorium on industrial expansion in the parish, LeBoeuf’s organization calls for real-time air monitoring of pollution and buffer zones around residential areas.

Community groups have battled for years against plans by Taiwanese company Formosa to build a $9.4 billion plastics plant near a predominantly Black town in the parish.

LeBoeuf and other prominent, local environmental activists met with White House officials in September to discuss the Biden administration’s progress in responding to concerns raised by United Nations human rights experts over industrial expansion in the Chemical Corridor.

LeBoeuf said she had rescheduled a doctor’s appointment to meet with White House officials. She believes her advocacy for environmental justice is just as important a cure for her community as her ongoing chemotherapy treatment is for her body.

“Both are medicine,” LeBoeuf said. “Fighting is medicine.”

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