Kragthorpe: BYU has no defense for what is happening this season

Starkville, Miss.

BYU’s Dayan Ghanwoloku weaved from the sideline into the middle of the field, enabling a Mississippi State tackler to catch him and spoil the Cougars’ best opportunity to score a touchdown in the first half Saturday.

The biggest problem with that sentence? Ghanwoloku is a defensive player.

Yet to blame BYU’s offense entirely for a 35-10 defeat would be disregarding how the defense couldn’t make third-down stops or keep the Bulldogs out of the end zone. BYU’s six-game losing streak, the program’s worst in nearly 50 years, officially became a complete team effort when the defense allowed TD drives of 74, 75 and 75 yards, spanning halftime.

If the Cougars (1-6) needed a model of efficient offense, they have film of Mississippi State’s 35 first downs and 546 total yards against BYU’s defense.

Unintentionally, BYU coach Kalani Sitake managed to solve the problem of having everyone ask his defensive players about the offense’s issues. The continuing story of Sitake’s second season, crossing the halfway point of a 13-game campaign, is a lamentation accompanied by the cowbells of Davis Wade Stadium.

Sitake began his postgame remarks about BYU’s defense by saying how tough it is to defend 84 plays, amid the offense’s ineffectiveness. This one time, though, he blamed the defense equally. “We were just getting gashed,” he said.

In any case, the Cougars should have skipped Starkville and gone straight to Greenville, N.C., where they’ll meet struggling East Carolina next weekend and avoid matching the program’s seven straight losses of 1968. Or will they?

Junior fullback Brayden El-Bakri cited a “lack of knowledge” for some offensive plays that didn’t work, while promising to “make sure everybody knows what they’re doing, because I can’t lose again.”

As of mid-October, BYU has succeeded in turning bowl eligibility into a genuine achievement. That’s the only reason to keep watching these guys, in a season when the Cougars have failed to beat a Power Five opponent for the first time since 2005, Bronco Mendenhall’s first year.

Any real hope of a breakthrough was crushed in the second quarter Saturday. The sequence that captured the Cougars’ season came right after Ghanwoloku’s first of two interceptions. BYU’s Ula Tolutau lost a fumble for the third time in four halves of football. The Cougar defense then allowed touchdown drives of 74 and 75 yards before halftime, sandwiching a Rhett Almond field goal.

That’s the opposite of what Mendenhall, now Virginia’s coach, labels “complementary football,” when one group follows through on the other’s success. The Cougars produced such a convergence in the third quarter, with Ghanwoloku’s interception leading to Tanner Mangum’s 27-yard TD pass to Aleva Hifo to make it 28-10. But a sack and a fourth-down interception kept the Cougars from taking advantage of Akile Davis’ fumble recovery on the kickoff, and then the Bulldogs (4-2) drove for another score.

The first sign that BYU would settle for little victories Saturday came on the first drive. Offensive coordinator Ty Detmer called a running play on third and 9, and El-Bakri crossed the 50-yard line — resulting in a punt. Third quarter, same story. Detmer ordered a third-and-6 run that failed near midfield.

“Trying not to make mistakes, I guess,” Sitake said.

In a successful effort to break a five-game losing streak in 1970, BYU used quarterback Brian Gunderson as a first-time starter against Utah State. If you were expecting a history-repeating performance by Cougar freshman Joe Critchlow, nothing like that happened. Critchlow’s entrance came with 3:40 remaining; he produced a three-and-out sequence to finish BYU’s 176-yard offensive day.

Executing a simplified game plan that emphasized short passes, Mangum completed 10 of his first 12 attempts, with two drops. But the Cougars kept failing to extend drives, and he finished 16 of 26 for 145 yards.

So this team is in the discussion with the 1968 Cougars, whose quarterbacking duties were shared by Marc Lyons. As a BYU radio analyst, Lyons will be a witness to the events at East Carolina, where the 2017 Cougars one way or another will do something remarkable.