2019 BYU Cougars Football Thread

[Pelado]

You think lower expectations were really there for Virginia? "You can lose more games here than you did at BYU!"

Kind of. Virginia was not accustomed to winning as many as 8 games per year. BYU fans had largely bored with only winning 8 games per year.

[Bo Diddley]

Kind of. Virginia was not accustomed to winning as many as 8 games per year. BYU fans had largely bored with only winning 8 games per year.

Just wait till Va wins 10 games for a few years, and then go back to 7 or 8. Bronco will be screwed!

[Pelado]

Just wait till Va wins 10 games for a few years, and then go back to 7 or 8. Bronco will be screwed!

Probably.

[Omaha 680]

Kind of. Virginia was not accustomed to winning as many as 8 games per year. BYU fans had largely bored with only winning 8 games per year.

Exactly. I'm not saying Virginia fans wont eventually become unreasonable if Bronco averages 8 wins a year with a few 10 and 11 win seasons sprinkled in. But at the time he left there is no question the expectations at Virginia were lower.

[Joe Public]

Critchlow is in the portal?

[Surfah]

Critchlow is in the portal?

Yes. His scholarship is going to Baylor.

[Art Vandelay]

Yes. His scholarship is going to Baylor.

I'm all for improving relationships with the Baptists, but is really necessary to give Rhule one of our schollies? Wasn't that terrible movie Baptists at our BBQ, enough of an offering?

[LVAllen]

Critchlow is in the portal?

Joe "The Show" says No to 2020.

[Pelado]

Somebody told me there's a BYU football game today. Is that true?

[Flystripper]

Not sure. Are they actually going to play this time?


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[Pelado]

Not sure. Are they actually going to play this time?


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Hope so.

[All-American]

Well, what a sucker punch way to end the roller coaster season.

Overall evaluation.

The record doesn’t show improvement—7-6 last year, 7-6 this year—but my gut tells me we were better in 2019 than 2018, even if not by much. This year featured two of the three biggest wins of the Sitake era, and maybe the biggest two. We logged a number of wins against bowl teams. I’m not sure the strength of schedule rating will itself bear out that we played a harder schedule, just because the bad teams were SO bad, but we arguably had more quality wins this year than any since Sitake took over.

And fans are pissed—maybe rightly so—that we didn’t win ten games this year. But for three woulda-coulda-shoulda games we would have. 7 wins last year felt like an accomplishment. This year it feels like an underachievement. That suggests to me, in its way, we are making progress. But we need to capitalize on it.

Tuiaki hate was rampant this year. Most of that hate was badly misdirected toward how many we rushed. The fact that we so often only rushed three was not the problem; it was what the eight who weren’t rushed were doing. We had problems in the backfield all year, starting with players who were supposed to contribute that never made it over. You saw in the second half of the Hawaii game how much better we would be if the backfield held to their schemes. That’s a coaching issue, though not the one fans are complaining about.

But to me the offense was far more disappointing, and shoulders far more of the burden of blame for our six losses. Red zone efficiency in particular just wasn’t good enough. The regression after the end of last year when things seemed to be clicking is hard to stomach. And our kicking game... goodness. It cost us at least the Toledo game, and who knows what the other games (SDSU in particular) would have looked like if we make even the gimme kicks.

So are we going in the right direction? I think so... but slowly. Very slowly. As a program we should be ahead of the G5 pack and in the thick of it with P5 programs. The latter, we actually accomplished this year. The former, oddly enough, not so much. Maybe we start clueing in on things that work and don’t, get a good base of experienced players instead of the underclassmen-heavy sides we have been fielding lately, and continue to build. Something tells me it doesn’t work that way, though. For the next couple of years I don’t know we will get much more from BYU football than a team that tends to win as many or more games as it loses. As our schedule upgrades that actually represents real progress. Just not as much as we want.

[BigFatMeanie]

Regarding the 3 man rush: My problem with rushing 3 is not so much a problem with that as the base defense; rather, it's the stubborn insistence on sticking with that base package every single down, every single situation, even when there were series/plays that cried out for something else. I'm not sure how many times BYU actually rushed 4, and even fewer times that they blitzed. It feels like fewer than 2 blitzes a game.

So, what did they get from all that downfield defense?

Here are BYUs rankings in every relevant defensive category:

Ints - #10 (tied with 5 others ) among FBS teams, 12 INTs in 12 games
Turnovers Gained - #20 (tied with 6 others) among FBS teams - 22 turnovers gained
Red Zone Defense - #30
Passing Yards Allowed - #35
Scoring Defense - #47
Fourth Down Defense - #48
First Down Defense - #54
Total defense - #62
Third down defense - #69
Rushing defense #90
Tackles for loss #120
Sacks - tied for #125 (3rd to last) with 3 other FBS teams (UMass, UNLV, UTEP), 12 sacks in 12 games.

It seems like BYU gave up way too much in order to get those 12 Ints. Perhaps a slightly more balanced approach to the defensive scheme, occasionally mixing in different sets and, heaven forbid, a blitz, when the situation warrants it, would produce a more balanced result in categories like rushing defense and total defense?

[Bo Diddley]

Regarding the 3 man rush: My problem with rushing 3 is not so much a problem with that as the base defense; rather, it's the stubborn insistence on sticking with that base package every single down, every single situation, even when there were series/plays that cried out for something else. I'm not sure how many times BYU actually rushed 4, and even fewer times that they blitzed. It feels like fewer than 2 blitzes a game.

So, what did they get from all that downfield defense?

Here are BYUs rankings in every relevant defensive category:

Ints - #10 (tied with 5 others ) among FBS teams, 12 INTs in 12 games
Turnovers Gained - #20 (tied with 6 others) among FBS teams - 22 turnovers gained
Red Zone Defense - #30
Passing Yards Allowed - #35
Scoring Defense - #47
Fourth Down Defense - #48
First Down Defense - #54
Total defense - #62
Third down defense - #69
Rushing defense #90
Tackles for loss #120
Sacks - tied for #125 (3rd to last) with 3 other FBS teams (UMass, UNLV, UTEP), 12 sacks in 12 games.

It seems like BYU gave up way too much in order to get those 12 Ints. Perhaps a slightly more balanced approach to the defensive scheme, occasionally mixing in different sets and, heaven forbid, a blitz, when the situation warrants it, would produce a more balanced result in categories like rushing defense and total defense?

Yeah, allowing the QB to get comfortable in the pocket hurts downfield defense quite a bit.

[wapiti]

Yeah, allowing the QB to get comfortable in the pocket hurts downfield defense quite a bit.

But it worked against USC!