Monson: Pardon my French, but what the hell is wrong with BYU?

The best news BYU football can hear right about now is this: It won’t lose this week.

Having suffered three consecutive losses, with a bye coming next, the Cougars aren’t all that comforted by the break, facing as they are a season on the brink. Truth is, the season has already slipped over the edge and plummeted to depths as deep as the program has plumbed since the Crowton years.

It’s not just the losing. It’s the way the Cougars are losing. When BYU ranks in most statistical categories as one of the worst offenses in the country, unable to move the ball on the ground or through the air, incapable of picking up first downs, averaging a mere 10 per game, there’s this question to ask:

What the hell is going on here?

The sympathetic want to point out that BYU has played tough competition, and that’s mostly true. LSU, for instance, a team that did not allow the Cougars to cross midfield, is so tough, it was crushed by Mississippi State on Saturday night. Wisconsin is good, and so is Utah, but nobody’s sure where on that scale of accomplishment those teams actually are, considering the weak competition, BYU included, they’ve played so far.

It’s hard to recall over the past 40 years an attack at BYU as impotent as this one. Provo is a place, after all, where LaVell Edwards pushed offensive football to new heights. When he took over at BYU, LaVell assessed the kinds of athletes he had in the program and knew innovation and creativity were the only paths toward success. He had some great assistant coaches and they found a way to build effective, explosive offense, and just enough defense to get by. Those assistants benefited from a boss who allowed them to experiment and from a schedule accommodating enough to facilitate a whole lot of winning.

Was that all a mirage, on account of playing in a substandard conference against teams that weren’t all that good? The Cougars had some nice victories against marquee teams through the seasons, but even Edwards’ teams, with those great offenses, struggled against better teams in bowl games. LaVell’s bowl record: 7-14-1.

But his reputation for offensive innovation attracted some great players and you know the names: Sheide, Nielsen, Wilson, McMahon, Young, Bosco, Detmer, Doman. Later, after Edwards had stepped away, there was Beck and Hall.

Those quarterbacks were put in situations where they could sling the ball around the field, and they had enough talent in front of them, behind them, and on the outside to advance the ball and keep advancing it. Jim McMahon, who won a Super Bowl with the Chicago Bears, once told me the best offense he ever played on was the one he directed at BYU. When I said, “You mean in college, right?” He answered in classic McMahonian style: “Did you not hear me? I said the best offense I ever played on was at BYU.”

Nobody could say that now.

There’s cruel irony in the fact that the guy who is orchestrating the sputtering attack is one of the best quarterbacks to ever play at BYU. Dude has a Heisman Trophy on his coffee table as proof. But he does not coach the way he played. Ty Detmer flung the football like a madman, sometimes crisply, sometimes cavalierly, sometimes carelessly. The year he won his trophy, he threw 28 interceptions.

Now he’s coordinating an offense that looks as though it has a chain around its neck. In four games, the Cougars have rushed the ball 99 times and thrown it 110. How many times have BYU’s opponents thrown it? The exact same number as the Cougars (110), the only difference being that those opponents have gained 887 passing yards to BYU’s 577. Detmer passed for 576 yards … in one game, against Penn State in the 1989 Holiday Bowl.

And now, 577 in four games?

There was a time when that would have been shocking.

Not anymore.

Opponents have rolled up exactly twice as many first downs as the Cougars — 86 to 43 — and nearly twice as many total yards — 1,620 to 887. BYU has converted on third down just 17 of 50 times and is 0 for 3 on fourth downs.

It cannot consistently move the football. It cannot retain possession of the football. It cannot pass it. It cannot run it. It can and does punt the football — a lot.

In a place credited with the rebirth and revolutionizing of big offense in the college game, this entire mess is … difficult. To have Detmer, a beloved son, driving this bus over the aforementioned cliff is downright unbearable for some BYU fans.

But that’s where Cougar football is now.

After what was considered by most to be a successful first season at his alma mater, Kalani Sitake is left to feel the press of a team that simply is not what it needs to be to righteously compete against top-level Division I teams. He not only criticized some of his players after Saturday’s 40-6 loss to Wisconsin, he pointed at the victors and said: “That’s what we want to be.”

And I want to be Leonardo DiCaprio.

His wish seemed a million miles away.

Better athletes must be found or developed. Better coaching, better coordinating, too.

Unless the players are straight dogging it, it’s easier to blame the coaches, who, as Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy once reminded us, are grown men. Athletes, who did not recruit themselves into the program, can only be as good as they are — and these guys are just college kids, trying to improve, looking a bit confused at how they’re being used.

BYU has a couple more shots at beating the kinds of opponents to which it likes to compare itself. Boise State is out there, and so is Mississippi State, but … uh, after that, there are a lot of lesser teams, if there really are lesser teams in a season like this. It’s remarkable to remember that the Cougars defeated Mississippi State in double overtime just last season. Maybe there’s hope in BYU knowing things can change that fast, in either direction.

But the real hope, reduced as it is now, remaining for the Cougars can be found in a stretch after the Broncos and Bulldogs that includes East Carolina, San Jose State, Fresno State, UNLV, UMass and Hawaii. Utah State comes after the bye week.

There’s hope and aspiration mixed in there somewhere, if that’s what anybody wants to call it.

GORDON MONSON hosts “The Big Show” with Spence Checketts weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone.