2010s – BYU’s Decade of Irrelevance

Let’s also take a look at all the “big names” that they’ve beaten in the past 10 years… those teams either finished hovering around .500 and not ranked or there worst season and I’m talking about Texas and Michigan State respectively. You could probably throw in Tennessee in there too. But their fans pat themselves on the back, pound their chest and act like their world beaters. 

All this talk about them getting into the Little 12 (what I’m calling it now) they’re going to learn something about parity within a tough league. There won’t be one dominant team like Oklahoma has been for the past decade all the teams will be able to beat each other and you’re going to have conference champions that have one, two, maybe three losses and I think they forgot a team named TCU which used to beat them like a drum in the MWC.

Back to parity, that’s why the Pac-12 is so hard everybody can beat everybody I mean you could probably say Oregon’s been the dominant team but even they take a loss here and there. It’s going to probably be amusing the next 10 years when they might realize how tough it is to play a real schedule and show some humility but I wouldn’t bet on it. 

I actually just did an in-depth statistical analysis, looking at every single P5 game over the last decade in order to rank every P5 team and conference (including the new incoming ones).

Not sure the best way to post a table here, but long story short, BYU ranks #52/69. On the one hand, that’s fairly solid considering they’ve been languishing in independence instead of having a P5 affiliation. On the other hand, it’s still not great or nationally relevant, ranking just between Cal and Virginia.

By comparison, Utah is #29 (dragged down by poor performance in early PAC12 years) in the same range as Texas, Northwestern, TCU, UCLA, Arizona St and Nebraksa.

I’d expect to see both teams improve their rank in the future; Utah as those early PAC12 years cycle out and BYU as they adjust to improved resources

Without question, the Y needed to join a conference. Without a doubt, the remnants of the Big12 is the best they could have hoped for. Next, they will face the week-in week-out work that Utah had to adjust to when we moved to the Pac. This conference grind is different than playing P5 teams in their non conference while they are cycling thru the depth chart getting ready for conference games. We also played Pac teams in both those rolls and it was shocking the difference we saw between the two. Batting 500 against the Texas schools and OSU will be a lofty goal the first 5 years as will 70% against the other mid majors in conference. Interest in P5 OOC games will be small while they try to clear those marks. And this all assumes a smooth transition. Once this gets under weigh, I expect we will hear less from the Y than any other time since the 60s.