BYU salvaged their season with a 24-21 win over
San Diego
State at home. I was at the game and fans were jubilant, myself included. This shows what a poor season it has been for the Cougars. Though a lot of the early season failures can be blamed on him, you’ve got to give some credit to head coach Bronco Mendenhall for yesterday’s effort. The firing of the D-coordinator and the resultant change in attitude/infusion of intensity was evident on the field. Not to mention, Bronco took a page out of
Boise
State coach, Chris Peterson’s bag of tricks with a fake field goal on BYU’s first offensive series of the game. The surprise call ultimately led to a touchdown on the drive and really got the Cougars going. Whatever Bronco was preaching all week sure worked.
The only problem is that BYU is still a mediocre offensive football team. Jake Heaps will continue to develop and will be quite a force in the years to come. As for the here and now though, BYU travels to
Fort Worth next week to play TCU. All that new found intensity and momentum is about to get zapped by a far superior team full of speed and play makers. To make matters worse, even when BYU had a really good team the past 2 years, they were still trounced in both TCU games by a combined score of 70-14. I don’t see BYU staying within 3 touchdowns next Saturday. That being said, you can feel good about yesterday’s win and that the Cougars are trying to right the ship heading into their first year of football independence in 2011.
Utah was a 68-27 winner on the road against
Iowa
State. Sure,
Iowa
State is a middle to lower tier Big 12 team but
Utah made them look ridiculous. I’m not kidding when I say this – I see no reason why
Utah can’t walk right into the Pac-10 next year and challenge for the conference title. I don’t mean go undefeated, but I could see them losing 2 games in-conference, winning their division and making it to the Pac-12 championship game. The name of the game in the AQ conferences is depth. Since you play teams every week that have first team players as talented as you, you’ve got to have 2nd team guys who are just as talented due to the injuries that pile up over the course of a season.
Utah might not quite be at the talent level of the top tier Pac-10 teams now but they will be soon. Any lack of depth though they more than make up for with one of the best coaches in the country in Kyle Whittingham.
As for
TCU – they simply took care of business with a 45-0 beat down of
Wyoming. On to the next one as far as they are concerned.
Same story for
Boise
State – The Broncos took care of their business in a dismantling of
Toledo. The best thing that happened to both
Boise
State and TCU over the weekend was that
Oregon
State beat previously undefeated and #9 ranked
Arizona. The better overall season
Oregon
State has, the greater the strength of schedule will be for both TCU and
Boise. They both played and beat
Oregon
State in games considered to be solid non-conference contests.
With
Alabama going down, it may have only made things tougher for a non-AQ school to get into the title game. I could see Alabama running the table the rest of the way and then beating
South Carolina in a rematch in the SEC championship game. The win could possibly jump them all the way up to a #2 ranking. Stay tuned though, there is plenty of football to be played still. Hope you’re enjoying the games as much as I am.
Matt Nielson has been writing about the college sports landscape in Utah and the Intermountain West since 2010. When he’s not pretending to be a professional blogger, he works full time as a residential real estate agent and house flipper. Matt graduated from Brigham Young University in 2000. He and his family reside in Salt Lake City, UT.
