Wednesday, August 18, 2010

BYU to go Independent?

According to news reports , BYU is considering going independent in football and rejoining the WAC for other sports. This seems like a questionable decision at best for a team that is hardly dominating their conference in football.
While there is no doubt that BYU is consistently able to schedule teams from BCS conferences for football, they don’t seem to beat them very consistently. Over the last 10 years BYU is a rather pedestrian 14 - 18 versus the BCS conferences and no bids to any of the major bowls. The one year they looked to be on their way as the first “BCS buster” they went 12-0, before being embarrassed at Hawaii and then losing their bowl game to end up 12-2. In contrast, the University of Utah has gone 18-11 with a Fiesta Bowl win and a Sugar Bowl win.
BYU did defeat Oklahoma at a neutral site for their opening game in 2009 with a late touchdown. They also lost at home to a bad Florida State team that finished 6-6 and TCU. In 2008, they lost to TCU in Texas, beat Washington 28-27 – Washington would finish the year 0-12 - and lost their bowl game to an Arizona squad they’d beaten earlier in the season. In 2007, they did beat Arizona to open the season, but lost to UCLA and Tulsa in consecutive weeks. In 2006, BYU had losses to Arizona and Boston College.
In just the last 4 seasons they are 4-4 versus the so-called major conferences. I would hardly call that dominating the larger schools with that record, and now BYU thinks they should get a Notre Dame exemption into the BCS if they go independent. This seems akin to Navy asking for an exemption simply because they are a service academy.
This would be understandable if BYU had in fact been dominating the Mountain West Conference and had a BCS bowl win to show for it. The fact is they have the exact same number of BCS bowl wins as Notre Dame in the last 10 years in three fewer appearances.
As a side note, I’d be the first to say that the Notre Dame exemption in the BCS bowl selection is absurd. No independent should be given consideration over a smaller conference to get into a major bowl. Certainly no team winning only 9 games, regardless of affiliation, deserves to go to a major bowl just because a non-BCS conference school was ranked in the top 12 of a poll, but that’s another argument all together. The simple fact of the matter is that everyone else has to be in a conference that has an automatic bid – another item that should be done away with – or they have to finish in the top 12 of the BCS poll.
Since the MWC came into being, BYU has won 2 football league titles outright and tied for a third. In ten years, that is not an overwhelming number. In the same time frame, the University of Utah has won 3 outright league titles and tied for a fourth in football. TCU, who joined in 2005, has won 2 conference titles. TCU also won 2 WAC titles and a Conference USA title in the years that the MWC has existed, prior to joining the conference.

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