Let’s say it all plain here. Why not, darn near everyone on the outside is.
BYU is going to struggle in its first football season in the Big 12 — and probably for a number of seasons. Don’t even bring up basketball.
And by struggle, we mean get not just beat, but beat down and beat up.
Vegas predicts that to be the case. And those folks, while not always correct, are often frighteningly bang on.
In the media poll, the Cougars were picked to finish 11th out of 14 teams, behind outfits like Kansas and Iowa State and UCF.
It’s going to be that kind of year. Not absolutely, but the lean is heavy in that direction.
In an informal poll of BYU fans taken by me, they, many of them, don’t see the heaviness in that lean. They see another H-word. They see hope. And why not? They’re fans, after all. They remember the good times and forget the bad. In the back reaches of their minds, they store victories over Oklahoma and Texas, not getting crushed by so many P5 teams. They don’t remember last season’s home loss to Arkansas, but they remember with exactness wins over Nebraska and Miami from years ago. Those same fans now, having more money extracted from them for things like the privilege of being season-ticket holders, are counting on hope, sacrificing for the program, investing in it, building toward positive thoughts. Nobody wants a bad investment.
But that’s what it’s going to be for … what, one season, two seasons, three seasons, four? And if that’s, in fact, the case, but the Cougars come out at the other end in position to win, then the investment won’t be so bad. In the meantime, an occasional triumph here, a victory there will be enough to keep feeding the hope. Unless it isn’t.
The problem for the Big 12 rookies is three-fold:
1) They currently don’t have enough talent, enough deep talent, to compete at the top level of the league.
2) They’re not used to facing tough conference competition, week in, week out. They haven’t been in any kind of league since they left the Mountain West. They’ve played some marquee teams, some quality teams. They handled the Pac-12 with excellence a couple of years back. But they weren’t playing for a conference title at that time, and their opponents were fully aware that beating or losing to BYU had no impact on chances for a league trophy. If that sounds like an excuse for those opponents, it’s not. It’s an explanation. Those kinds of annual rivalries stir up motivation, but also difficulties that may work for and against the Cougars moving forward.
3) While some league newcomers will be able to increase their recruiting success in a bigger, better environment, the way Utah did as the early seasons of Pac-12 play wore on, BYU’s recruiting is considerably more challenging. The Honor Code is still in place, and that’s not so much a hurdle for some young athletes who want to read scripture, attend religion classes, avoid sex, avoid alcohol, embrace — or at least absorb — increments of Latter-day Saint doctrine and practice scrubbed-clean living, others do not want to do that. Moreover, they don’t want to pretend to do it, acting a certain way outwardly, but a different way inwardly, in the manner of more than a few players at the school who fake their way through it all. It happens, just ask around.
So, yeah, this is going to take some time.
Not saying it won’t ever happen, that it can’t happen. Just saying it won’t happen overnight, just saying the road will be rocky for a while — until BYU can gather in enough great athletes who are as comfortable with forbearance as they are football. Transfers will help fill gaps, and there will be an abundance of both.
BYU has some fine coaches, guys who get it — the technical aspects of the game and also the nuances involved in the human condition. Smart and honest people such as offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick and defensive coordinator Jay Hill. That’s a big bonus. Kalani Sitake knows a few things about young men, the way they think and act, and he’s intelligent enough to rely on Roderick and Hill, along with the rest of his staff to smooth over whatever needs to be smoothed, to grade the road.
And there will be 50 miles of bad road ahead, handling the bumps that come with talent deficiency, depth issues, and defeat. More of it than Cougar fans are accustomed to.
BYU is a proud football program with a proud tradition. But the preseason projections by both oddsmakers and media members alike indicate that that pride isn’t enough to conquer what’s directly in front of the Cougars.
Hope is a good thing, a useful thing, but the task ahead is … heavy.
Hope doesn’t win the fourth quarter against Oklahoma State at Boone Pickens in Stillwater and it doesn’t crush TCU at Amon Carter in Fort Worth, not in combination with the full force of a Big 12 schedule.
There are winnable games ahead. There will be some surprises. The question is, how many?
Character is not in question. BYU has enough of that to honor itself. The Cougars will play hard even when the forces against them are hard.
But mediocrity — as measured by the win-loss record — has never been a friend to BYU football, not for 50-plus years, anyway. In the 2023 season, that will have to change. It is what it is, a truth to handle. A friend or at least a companion mediocrity will have to be.
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