Yuck

Thoughts from a disappointing football game last night:

- BYU did not play terribly. It was disappointing, but not terrible, but not good either.

- TCU is better than 24th in the nation. They will move up in the rankings, and deserve to.

- Let's look objectively at BYUs games so far this year:

• Northern Iowa: a pretty good I-AA team, which translates to a mediocre to poor I-A team. BYU played well, but not great against them. BYU looked like a ranked team, perhaps, but not a top-10 team.
  
• Washington: a winless I-A team. BYU won by a point. The closest Washington came to beating anyone else so far is a 7 point loss to Stanford. Is Stanford ranked?
• UCLA: a poor Pac-10 team. (Sorry, that was a bit redundant.) BYU absolutely crushed them. Beating a poor team 59-0 is just what a top 10 team would do.
• Wyoming: a bad WAC team. Wyoming has been outscored in conference play 153-23. They are 2-5 with a 1 point win over Ohio and a 3 point win over I-AA N.D. State. They lead the nation in turnovers. Beating them isn't exactly a big accomplishment.
• USU: a bad WAC team. BYU looked ok against them, but not like a top 10 team.
• UNM: an ok MWC team. 21-3 victory, that probably should have been 21-10, because that was a pretty cheap holding call.
• TCU: 32-7 loss to a good team, where BYU never looked like they had a chance.

- My point is, the UCLA game is the only game where BYU has looked like a top 10 team. Even before the TCU game, BYU was either a top 10 team that had played a bad game 3 or the last 4 weeks, or they were about a #20 team that had played one excellent game where everything went their way. TCU confirmed that the latter is more accurate.

- I give Bronco credit for going for it on 4th down. Rather than trying to kick a few field goals and make the score look a bit better, he played for the only chance his team had to actually come back and win. He played to win, rather that to keep himself from looking foolish for missing a 4th and whatever.

- If Utah had been in Fort Worth last night, there is little chance they would have won. I've seen a couple of Utah games this year and I know what we all know: Utah plays just good enough in 1 half to make up for their lapses in the other half. Utah has not played only 1 game against a I-A opponent with a winning record at this point (Air Force) and Air Force has 4 wins against SUU, Wyoming, Houston and SDSU.

- I've only seen 1 TCU game, but I'm ready to say that they are the best team in the conference.