There are a few reasons for optimism:
Our 3 losses are all to teams that are fringe top-25 teams. Nevada, FSU and AF have all been ranked, or were within a few votes of being ranked this year. AF gave OU everything they could handle. Nevada is 4-0 for the first time as a FBS team. Sagarin has BYU's schedule as the 4th toughest in the nation thus far.
The schedule gets much easier from here. Utah State is improved, but still beatable. Then SDSU at home, TCU (who we never had a shot at beating anyway), and then Wyoming, UNLV, CSU and UNM (3 of which are at home). So that's 6 winnable games out of the next 7. We picked the right year to travel to TCU and Utah, because the home field advantage probably wouldn't have been enough to matter anyway.
With Heaps getting all the practice snaps, and all the game time snaps, maybe the team can improve over time.
But here is the thing that worries me:
Against Nevada, BYU was +2 on turnovers committing none themselves. BYU had only 1 penalty for 5 yards. No missed field goals. And yet, BYU was never in danger to win the game. This wasn't a game where you could sit back afterwards and point to a bad call, or a bad bounce, or bad luck as the turning point of the game. This is who they are. This is apparently the talent (or lack thereof) the team has. And there just isn't much there.
1 comment:
You are correct that we were never in danger of winning. The thing that you fail to note is that we were in the red zone 5 times, and only scored 13 points on it. If (big if) we can find someone to pound the ball in the red zone, and Jake Heaps can hit his receivers (another big if) we score on all 5 of those trips and the game is very close, if not won by BYU. Also to note is we could have easily kicked field goals and we would have only lost the game by 1 score.
Also, as any good engineer should do, I'll extrapolate from last week's game to this week's game. Provided we continue to increase in our performance every week, we'll knock Utah out at the end of the year and win our bowl game finishing the season 8-5.
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