Nothing to de-escalate. BYU means nothing, is nothing and will be nothing to me. Just another non-conference game before the real season begins.
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I’ve hijacked your “P12 week 1 lines” thread long enough. My school just needs to win.
We certainly have more depth, but there was more going on than just a depth discrepancy. The larger problem was timing. Our 2008 and 2004 teams were as good as anything college football can produce. Those teams would have been just fine in the Pac-12. But we entered the Pac-12 in the middle of a mini-drought of talent. We had poor QBs and WRs. Depth alone wouldn’t have fixed that problem.
To put it another way, our 2012 team, which finished 5-7 overall, may have been a 7 or 8 win team in the old MWC. It just wasn’t a special team at all.
Perenthetically, BYU hasn’t had a truly good team of the level I’m talking about since 1996. But I’m sure their '96 team would have also been good in the Pac-12. A good team is a good team.
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So far, they both have the same number of wins against P5, top 25 teams - zero. Bronco finished in the top 25 a few times with BYU, but he never did so convincingly by beating a very good team. His best wins as a coach were against Utah, and they were very early on in his tenure. Bronco’s later years were pretty lousy in general. I see very little difference in the results with Bronco vs Kalani.
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It really isn’t better. They rank below South Alabama in talent composite:
What Bronco has done at UVA is impressive.
I mean, it takes at least some mild instability to post on a rival’s message board (or to stalk a rival’s message board). When people here report on the latest from Cougarboard, I know I’m reading someone who has BYU in their head even more than I do, and that scares me a bit. Ute fans who follow BYU fans on twitter is the same thing. When I have to tell people to let it go, you know they’ve gone too deep into rivalry.
We’ll see. That division is the worse division in P5 football, and it has a different winner every season. If they manage to win a few in a row, I’ll be impressed. But just winning it once…I mean, they basically just rotate the division title around at random.
A former utah DL grew up in my neighborhood. I watched most of the utah games while he was there. There are plenty of reasons to watch our rival games I suppose.
I also talked to a member of your coaching staff each Sunday between meeting. He’s since moved on to another school but it was fun to talk football with him.
No. Get your laughs somewhere else.
I do watch BYU twice each season - vs Utah and vs Boise. I like Boise, which I know is unusual around here. But last year was different. Most seasons, I can just watch those two games and move on from Provo. Last season, I was anxious for them to lose to end all the talk about them. Thank you, Coastal!
So, yeah, I still have strong feelings about BYU. Also, the ducking the UW game right after the “anyone, anywhere, anytime” headband was just classic fun.
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I think the scary thing about byu is the Nucua brothers at WR. They will make plays in the game no doubt. Without those two I don’t see byu having a chance to beat the Utes this year.
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I am weird and follow the composite rankings for teams and recruiting. UVA has become a top 60 talent team. That’s impressive. I do agree the division is soft. That said, UVA has looked better on the field since he got to Jefferson’s neighborhood.
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Utah is 32nd in team talent to BYU’s 97th. Utah will have to lose a large swath of players to lose that game.
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Yeah. With Ty Jordan the Utes beat byu by at least three scores. Hopefully one of the RBs steps up by the 11th and will wreck them in the 2nd half.
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1st team, yes. And if they stayed healthy like they did that year (in PAC12), they would still have been as good as they were, maybe even better and battle tested. But winning strongly also instilled confidence. A couple injuries to a few players and we didn’t have the depth the rest of the season to be as great. We’ll never fully know.
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No, BYU is not awful. I just don’t the football team is anywhere near as good as last year’s record would make some think. I think last year was a year of 1 offs for BYU. Like Bamafan was saying, BYU’s recent (4 or so years) shows a 7 to 8 win team. Can BYU win this year? Yes. Will they? Don’t think so, Whit should have the team ready mentally to play every week. He’s done pretty well with that, especially since we got into the PAC12.
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You’re right, so many of BYU fans are rather insufferable. @wingnut brings good perspective and occasionally uncomfortable questions. Those are good to have, they help keep us grounded.
You brought it up. I responded. You thought that current Utes are as insufferable as byu fans back in the day. We’re not. Mostly, we are ambivalent.
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Ambivalent, or indifferent?
I’m much more of the later, and will continue to be until BYU actually wins a game again (which as discussed here, will certainly happen eventually)… Then I’ll move toward ambivalence - for the year that it takes to return to dominance by our team and indifference by me. It will take a move by BYU to a P5 conference, and then several years of recruiting adjustment, for BYU to again be regularly competitive with Utah.
For now, I’d really rather be playing almost anyone else that week, frankly. Bring on TCU.
BYU is sort of where Utah was in 2012 and 2013, some good #1’s but generally thin on talent after that. Unless the P5 team is rolling in the Dumpster Fire category, or the looking to the next game category, they should generally be able to handle beating BYU.
To the asterisk that was last season, Dan Patrick’s show yesterday talked about how strange it was to see Coastal Carolina and Liberty playing in a bowl game. If one didn’t know we were talking football, they would’ve assumed we were talking basketball.
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What is happening today with Utah/BYU is similar to what happened to Utah/USU after they were no longer in the same conference. Sure, the teams continued to play for years, but the Utah/BYU rivalry quickly displaced the Utah/USU rivalry as the most important in the State. Is the game important to fans and participants? Clearly it is. Is it ever the most important game for Utah? No! Just as the USU game lost importance and devolved into a fun game with some bragging rights the same is becoming true for the BYU game. Unless BYU finds its way into a P5 conference, the game will take on less and less importance to participants and fans (the media is another story).
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