This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Loyalists and apologists can spin it any which way they'd like, but there is a dark fact hanging over BYU football that provides more evidence that the program's competitive goals, and the expectations of many of its fans, do not match its reality.

For the third year in the last five, BYU did not have a player selected in the NFL Draft.

That means something substantial.

It means the Cougars are lacking top-end talent.

That's not just my opinion. It's the opinion of talent evaluators who are paid good money because they are the best at what they do and who operate in a pressure-packed realm where the only thing that matters is winning. Their job is as clear and simple in its aim as it is complicated in its execution: Find the best players on the planet, the players who will best help their organizations win games. End of story.

Those talent scouts do not always get it right. But they get it right a whole lot more than they get it wrong.

In their view, again, they did not see a single player coming out of BYU who warranted utilizing a precious draft pick to obtain. Not a single player or pick. After scouting games, after breaking down film, after looking at athletes for what they really are, not what they were purported to be, after visiting the school's pro day, the guys who sit at the top of their field as judges of talent decided nobody at BYU was worthy.

Only a blind man, or someone who didn't want to see the truth for what it is, wouldn't look at that as an indication of a problem. The least of egotistical college coaches regularly give credit to their players as the reason for their success. Great players who play great make for great teams. If the Cougars have no — or few — great players, how are they supposed to have great teams?

They're not. And they don't.

Anomalies in the draft do sometimes occur. Exact numbers of players taken do not always indicate in an absolute way which teams were the best. But you've at least got to have some dogs in the fight to have a chance to win the fight. BYU had none, again.

Compare that with Florida State, which had 11 players taken this year and has had 29 selected over the past three years. Alabama had seven picks. Florida had eight. USC had six. Oklahoma and Stanford had six. The Ohio State Buckeyes, the national champions, had five taken and have a whole lot more in the pipeline. Clemson and Georgia and Oregon and Arkansas had five. Utah had four.

On the flip side, Texas had five players drafted and BYU beat the Longhorns last season on their home field. Some might swallow that whole and use it to argue that talent taken in the NFL Draft doesn't mean a darn thing. Not true. There are always outliers. Less talented teams sometimes beat more talented ones on a given day. More talented teams sometimes underperform. It happens in the specific, not so much in the general. Check out BYU's record against better competition of late. A season's worth of evidence is more accurate, along with multiple seasons' worth.

The SEC had more players taken than any other league. The Pac-12 wasn't far behind. There's a reason for that.

To reiterate, the draft tally isn't absolute. If it were, Hobart and Monmouth and Central Arkansas and Mars Hill and Newberry would have better teams than BYU. But when the numbers stack up, they reveal the programs that at least have the building blocks, if properly coached and coalesced, to win a lot of meaningful games against meaningful competition, week after week after week.

The Cougars have had a couple of cases of top talent in recent years, including Kyle Van Noy, who was effectively recruited and developed by BYU coaches, and Ziggy Ansah, who was kind of an other-world accident.

But that's been the exception more than the rule. They had nobody drafted in 2011 and 2012. In the past 10 years, they've had eight players taken in the main draft, only one a first-round pick (Ansah). Most of their players selected were taken in the draft's back half.

In the decade prior to Bronco Mendenhall's arrival, BYU had 22 players selected, including two first-round picks. From 1983 through 1993, 34 Cougars were drafted, if Steve Young and Gordon Hudson are included. Back then, there were more rounds and that should be mixed into consideration. But even if you knock off the selections after the seventh round, there were some 20 players picked.

Either way, the trend is clear and a conclusion can be drawn: BYU has fewer NFL-caliber athletes in its program now than it did then.

Some say that's happening because BYU is recruiting more Boy Scouts than NFL guys. Some say the Honor Code has taken its toll. Some say Mendenhall is a weird dude who doesn't put out a good vibe with elite athletes, instead preferring the gritty, plucky types. Some say the LDS mission emphasis has messed the thing over. Some say the Cougars used to have a signature offense run by brilliant offensive minds that helped linemen and quarterbacks get noticed and that that no longer exists.

Whatever it is, the significant admission is that … it, indeed, is.

That's a dilemma for the Cougars moving forward, considering their desire to gain P5 conference inclusion and, before that, as they attempt to enhance their annual schedules against teams with top talent.

The more BYU strikes out in the NFL Draft, the more programs recruiting against the Cougars, vying for some of the same athletes, are pointing out to those recruits that their own programs send players to the NFL as a matter of routine, while BYU only sends them as a matter of exception. It's significant ammo because almost every college football player not only wants to go pro, almost every college football player thinks he deserves to go pro.

Almost every college football player wants to play at a school that will help him make that a reality.

At BYU, a shot at that dream now is more long than it is sure.

GORDON MONSON hosts "The Big Show" with Spence Checketts weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone. Twitter: @GordonMonson. —

In-state draft picks

Utah college football players taken in NFL draft, 2011-2015, according to NFL.com

Utah • 11

Utah State • 8

BYU • 2

Southern Utah • 1