PROVO » Describing BYU's football season shortly after the Cougars lost 31-21 in the Las Vegas Bowl on Saturday night, receiver Austin Collie succinctly said that the team "hit a wall" in 2008.

At some point after back-to-back shutouts over UCLA and Wyoming and a dominating first quarter against Utah State, something happened to the Cougars, several players acknowledged, and they were never quite the same. Sure, they defeated punch-less New Mexico 21-3 a week after the USU win to improve to 6-0, but the swagger was gone, and when TCU handed them that devastating 32-7 public humiliation on Oct. 16, they were finally exposed as slow and predictable on defense and too one-dimensional on offense.

Most of the rest of the season was a futile exercise in trying to re-capture that early magic.

As they enter what will be the most important offseason of the Bronco Mendenhall coaching era, the question will be whether the entire program has hit a wall. Will it be fortunate to just maintain its status as an annual conference-title contender and nothing more, or can it take the step as Mendenhall's infamous "Quest for Perfection" mantra suggested it was capable of at the start of his fourth season and make a legitimate run at a BCS bowl berth?

"Like I said, we just hit a wall as a team, being good, not great, and I think that we have a lot of work to do to kind of push us over the edge and become one of the great teams," Collie said.

Hard work will help, certainly, but talent, speed and the ability to make adjustments based on the strengths of their opponents were seemingly the ingredients missing for the 10-3 Cougars in 2008. In their three losses, they turned the ball over 13 times and were simply ill-equipped to handle the types of athletes and athleticism that Utah, TCU and Arizona possessed.

They turned the ball over just 15 times in their 10 wins, and defeated just one team that finished with a winning record, Air Force.

Still, in his postgame comments after the Arizona loss, Mendenhall did not seem willing to acknowledge that the mistakes were the result of talent issues. Rather, they are correctable through more emphasis, he suggested.

"The best way I can describe maybe why there were ball security issues was in those games we were trailing in, it might just be we were pressing to do too much," he said. "Hopefully, our team has learned that lesson this season because in all three losses we have trailed, and turned the ball over quite a bit more than we had before, and I think it is just pressing, is the best way I could describe it. And so somehow I will have to address that at a higher level as a coach."

He said nothing about getting better players.

But Collie, who broke practically every BYU receiving record on the books, for a single season and a career, indicated that what the Cougars have been doing might not be good enough in the changing landscape that is the Mountain West Conference football race.

"It was a good season, not a great season. It was a good season," he said. "You know, 10-3 is not bad, but it is not great. Like I said, I think we had the potential to have a great season. ... We need to get in the weight room and get out on the field and really find that edge, and go over that edge. I think that there is a point that we have hit that we kind of need to take it to the next level as a team."

Of course, a lot depends on whether the team's only true game breaker in 2008 returns for his senior season. Collie has sent in his paperwork to the College Advisory Committee to be evaluated for the 2009 NFL draft.

If he returns, the BYU offense will be as skilled as it was this season, but will be breaking in almost an entirely new offensive line. Only starting left tackle Matt Reynolds returns from that unit.

Entering the season, BYU's defense was the big question mark, because it had just three returning starters. Turns out, those concerns were realized, despite Mendenhall's claims that he could just "plug in" new players and maintain the consistency showed the previous year by Bryan Kehl, Kelly Poppinga and others.

He couldn't, obviously.

Eight defensive starters will be back next year, but can they improve enough to take some pressure off the offense, which in 2008 panicked when it fell behind and started to press too much? Mendenhall will bring in a couple of junior college transfers to bolster the secondary and linebacking corps, and the possibility exists that some true freshmen could land starting spots, especially if the Cougars land Manti Te'o, a linebacker rated as the No. 8 overall prep prospect in the country by one national recruiting service.

Whatever happens, it was clear after the Arizona loss that neither Mendenhall nor the players were satisfied with how things went in a season that began with six wins.

"On behalf of our team, a 10-3 season is a solid season for us. Certainly, the standards for our program are much higher.....so I don't think you will talk to any of our players who feel great about 10-3. You will find that most of them are anixous to get back and improve," Mendenhall said.