Latest / Brutally Honest BYU Pod / BYU’s Excuses Are Getting Old | Was UCF a Fluke—or a Warning?
Transcript
- Josh Crowley: A third and long throw beyond the sticks felt like a trick play coming out of A-Rod's bag. And that needs to be a more regular call. What's up, Brutally Honest, here with a solo episode. if you can imagine Saturday being any worse, the reason why Nate is not here is that since Saturday he has been trying to pass a kidney stone. So we have tried to record several times this week already, and it hasn't worked out because he has just been in so much pain. poor guy pulling the curtain back a little bit, Nate. is honestly the toughest guy I know and I feel really bad for him. Nate certainly cannot afford to be dealing with a kidney stone at the moment. So thoughts and prayers with Nate get better soon. but yeah, from a BYU perspective, it was really, really a crappy weekend. needed to hop on here. Just again, we're brutally honest up in here, so we aren't gonna shy away from the realities of a win or a loss. And this one was particularly painful. wanna jump right into it. This won't be a particularly long episode, but you know, Nate and I have talked for a long time about how there's kind of some interesting widely accepted things. within football that we would love to see changed. One of the ones that we've talked about the most is this idea that benching a quarterback is just going to completely destroy his confidence and that there's just never a place to bench a quarterback unless you are absolutely sure that he's never going to be your starter again. I don't understand why that is a thing. I don't understand why quarterbacks can't be just as resilient as a pitcher in major league baseball or any number of other positions in any number of other sports where sometimes you don't have your best stuff and you get benched and if you work hard and you come back you can get back on the field that's just an athletics deal. obviously BYU's not dealing with that. One of the other narratives, the reason that I bring up this idea of narratives that are just accepted widely for some reason, is this idea of the two time zone travel. it's just old, it's tired. these players, are making a lot of money. to play a sport and I know they're young. many of us, if not all of us, have traveled and understand what it's like to have a time change and to have to adjust and especially to do that on a shortened timeline. I get it, but at the same time that game was played at three thirty Eastern. you know, what's the difference between one thirty mountain, three thirty Eastern? I don't understand what it is about the travel that makes football so impossibly hard to play at your highest level. I think it's a tired, worn out excuse. I also think that the coming off of a big win. obviously it's real. I mean it's happening across college football. It's not just a BYU thing. again, I just don't know that I fully understand, right? It's the same amount of time to game plan. same amount of time to prepare and and to be focused and to know your opponent, know your strategy, know the ways that you're going to try to exploit them and and prepare for ways that they might try to exploit you. when you just played potentially your best football of the year that there's this tendency for college football teams to come out and play their worst football of the year. Think about, the playoffs, whether college football or NFL, right? Sometimes it takes your best football in the semifinal. would it be acceptable to just go to the Super Bowl and be like, well, we had an emotional letdown because in the NFC championship we had our best stuff and we just didn't have our best week of practice. Right? I don't understand why that's not a narrative. but for college football, there's this narrative that, big emotional game, usually a letdown. I think that all of the goals that this team has are still on the table. I didn't come into this season just thinking that we were gonna go undefeated. I understand you can't win all and credit to UCF for a great game played, but it certainly feels like all of a sudden you have relinquished your your grip on controlling your own destiny. And now there's scenarios, lots of actually, where even if you win out and finish the regular season eleven and one, you might miss the conference championship game. there's way too much of a traffic jam at the top of this conference. Obviously lots of football left to play. I think at eleven and one you have a good chance of making the conference championship game, but it's it's not a hundred percent chance. So Really disappointed. I actually went down to the game. Had a great time traveling with a buddy that I don't get to see a lot. We had a lot of fun doing just a kind of spur of the moment boys trip. highly recommend if you haven't done one in a while. had a good time, but man, that game it was just weird. The the stadium environment was weird. the crowd interaction was weird, The weather weather was really bizarre. Started out crazy hot. I ended up freezing. still fun to see the Cougars play in person. you know, that first drive was awesome. and there were many moments in the game where, it was great cougar football and then there was just some really uncharacteristic errors, miss tackles, brain dead mistakes and then kind of the roller coaster that was the last fifteen minutes of that game. it was wild. now you're kinda behind the sticks as it were and you gotta kinda hope for some help and you gotta have your best stuff. I thought the game planning was pretty weak. I don't really understand how you come out against Notre Dame clearly having schemed up a game plan to give yourself the best chance to win against an opponent that you respected and then you come out a week later, same amount of time to prepare against a team that you're verbally saying is talented and fast and well coached. you might as well just hit rinse and repeat on Kalani's Monday comments every week. Well coached, lots of team speed, we're gonna have to be at our best if we're gonna win this game. but is that really the attitude in the coordinator rooms as they're going through film it just looked like we thought that we were gonna be too big, too strong, too physical, that we just weren't gonna need to scheme things up I just don't understand where some of the creativity was in bringing pressure from a defensive standpoint, confusing the quarterback, and then from an offensive standpoint, look, Sion Moa Love the dude. So grateful that he's healthy enough to play football. He didn't have it. 13 carries for 36 yards. That's just not going to get it done. Especially in a rainy game. And Preston Rex was looking a lot better. I don't know if Preston was dinged up in the middle of the game. both of them were running primarily zone read, up the gut or off tackle. runs, just our very basic day one spring football run plays. And you've seen us run, the legend Glasker between the offensive line and the quarterback with the pitch forward. And as we talked on this podcast, there's so many options off of that play. where's that? then it was just bizarre for us to get into a third and long in overtime. I legitimately was thinking We're gonna zone run this and we're gonna get try to get the three yards back that we lost on first and second down, and we're gonna kick a field goal and hope that our defense can hold for the win. And then we pass downfield to Legend Glasker like this is what we do on third and long, and he goes for a touchdown, and you just kinda go, Man, where is the throwing beyond the sticks with this offense? listen You all know if you've been around, I am an A-rod apologist. I think that he sets himself up not only for later in game, but later in season. But that felt like almost a trick play, right? A third and long throw beyond the sticks felt like a trick play coming out of A-Rod's bag. And that needs to be a more regular call. you can debate Till the cows come home, being backed up on your own one foot line with a minute and a half left, the best way to handle that. I have mixed feelings on that. Being in the stadium and the vibes in the stadium, I was pretty nervous about a safety, not just from a sack, but a pressure that ends up in a hold in the end zone or an intentional grounding that gets rolled a safety. So I wasn't a huge fan of dropping back to pass in that scenario. I actually understood playing the field position game, force them to use their timeouts game and relying on your punter. I didn't mind that. it ended up getting us to overtime by the skin of our teeth. if you get rid of a Keanu Tanavasa mind numbing penalty they're probably not even attempting. a field goal in that scenario and then the decision making offensively probably looks even better. but that aside, I thought it was so strange how there were times where we moved with ease through the defense and went and got touchdowns at the beginning of the first half, beginning of the second half, and in overtime. and then other periods where it was like, well if Sione Moa doesn't suddenly become LJ Martin, then we're not sure what to do. Kyler Casper was having himself a day. We really didn't try to get ledge in the ball much. Preston Rex, as I've all already mentioned, was having some success. you know, where where were your tight ends in this game? in Walker Lions, I don't understand how you don't come up with that catch on fourth and goal in double overtime. I understand that he was kind of getting tripped up and there was a decent amount of contact on that play. But it's in your gut, man. Game on the line. That's why you play the game. Gotta come up with that. Really disappointing. Would have loved to have seen, back to back two point plays with the chance to win it, especially with our defense having held them on the goal line already. that would have been the definition of an ugly win, which is exactly what we called for on this pod. just a gut punch. super disappointed. I feel that in any given season when all is said and done, you look back over the 12 regular season games, most seasons I find that there's this pattern you've got eight games that you can point to that are On any given Saturday, your average, this is what this team is. And then you usually have two games that I would say more than a standard deviation below your average, where it's like we did not have our best stuff, we were not playing our best. that's not representative of this team, and then you usually have two games. where it's more than a standard deviation in the positive. And it's like that was our best game, effort wise, execution wise, game plan wise, all across the board. The question now becomes, was UCF definitely more than a standard deviation below what this team's actual capability is? Was that an abnormally good game for UCF and that's why we ended up with the result that we did? Or was that more representative of what we can expect this Saturday and for the next five? we'll see. We'll find out this weekend. had to give a shout out to a couple of people that are just continuing to show up in our comments for some reason. we had MBHST twenty-three. And Tommy McLaughlin Z seven P. I did not expect to be needing to explain to Notre Dame fans that now that you have a loss against BYU, you only have two tough games on your schedule all year, you want BYU to do well. Coming back to the comment section to try to rein on BYU's parade or celebrate BYU's loss is a bizarre place to be. But hey, we'll take the engagement. MBH S T twenty three in particular, you have really improved our video distribution just by your comments alone. you said, hope the victory lap was enjoyable. it was really enjoyable MBH S T twenty three and Honestly, I'll continue to lap Notre Dame over and over and over and over again because we beat your butt. hope that you enjoy the Fat L you better hope that you got your best stuff against Miami. There's no way you end up in the top twelve for a bunch of victories over the Stanfords of the world I'm sorry that you didn't have your best stuff against us. I'm sorry that your team is not nearly what you thought it was. I will continue that victory lap. we play athletes in the Big Twelve. UCF had athletes. we did not struggle with Notre Dame athletes. we struggled with UCF athletes, which just goes to show Being in a conference with really good teams, sometimes you get exposed. maybe we need to schedule more of an independent type schedule against independent teams that just are untested, unproven. let's just keep the victory laps coming against the Notre Dame fans. hope keep coming back, honestly. you guys blew up our video About half of our overall video watch hours on this channel are thanks to Notre Dame fans. So keep coming back. I'll give Notre Dame fans a shout out in every video. If it means you guys keep coming back, keep commenting and asking about how the victory lap is going. looking ahead to Arizona State, little bit more juice in my Crowley home for the ASU game. My in-laws are all from Phoenix area, big big ASU fans so my wife is freaking out a little bit. she's full blooded true blue through and through. no ASU love in her heart whatsoever. So she's really hoping we get the win. there's lots of reasons for optimism. I think this team's gonna be ticked. I think being at home back in Laval Edwards Stadium is a big deal. Looks like the weather is hopefully not as wet as we maybe had thought earlier in the week. It's looking more and more like it might just be cold and cloudy as opposed to real wet and rainy. I hope that's the case because I think that plays in our favor. looks like probably a freshman quarterback for ASU getting his first start in his career against BYU. I put that in both the pro and the con bag. on the one hand, that's a really tough environment to get your first start in and I think Kelly Papinga will be look licking his chops to get him confused and, get him sped up and making some mistakes. Hopefully we end this streak of no interceptions that we've been on now for several weeks running. on the other hand, BYU has a history of letting young, unproven quarterbacks go off. Right. You think Josh Hoover back in twenty twenty three, and you kinda worry, when all the pressure's on BYU, nobody's expecting ASU to come in this game and win, and he's got some really talented wide receivers, and now we're down Evan Johnson. that could be a bad recipe. So it'll be really interesting. I hope that the team dials it back in, gets everything back. on track gotta have your best stuff. not that I think it's gonna take a perfect game against ASU to win. but you don't want this game to be in doubt in the fourth quarter, quite frankly. You need to put this game away early and feel like hey we're back to ourselves, we're back on track headed into the Holy War week. that 2024 game is one of the more painful ones in recent BYU memory, right? Really hard fought game. the ending was crazy. Kenny Dillingham went to the top of my list of coaches that I despise in the Big Twelve after that game. But he owned that this week very forthrightly said I acted inappropriately at the end of that game and got to tip my cap. You don't find a lot of coaches who willingly look back and say, Hand up, that was not my best moment. So credit to him for that. really disappointed in the in the uniform matchup. back on October seventeenth when ASU played at Texas Tech, they had a white white maroon uniform combo that was so fresh, I don't understand why it's not their every week uniform. I'm on record as saying that ASU jerseys can s sometimes be some of the worst in college football, particularly the Greys. that they'll pull out randomly. it looks like they haven't had a gray this season, which is a good call. unfortunately BYU's going Navy, Navy, Navy. with the Navy helmets that never look like they match the jersey color. cannot stand that. we have some of the best jerseys in college football and we continue to insist on bringing these combos that just don't scream BYU football. It looks like we're halfway to a blackout, which isn't my favorite either. But as long as we are ahead on the scoreboard at the end of sixty, give me the cougs all day long. as an update where we're at. obviously neither of us did very well in our score predictions for the UCF game. I had us winning 3521, Nate had us winning 3817, with the final score being thirty-nine thirty-one. I scored six points, Nate scored three. So that brings our season total to Nate leading 119 to 100. gotta wonder if Nate feeling like crap with the kidney stone might be affecting his outlook on this game. He's feeling really nervous about our defense in particular, our inability to tackle Evan Johnson being down. So he's got us winning this one 31 to 26. I am really hopeful that things get back on track, that we get the secondary figured out, and that a freshman quarterback really struggles with the crowd noise and that we can kind of get out to an early lead in this one. So gimme the Coogs winning thirty five to fourteen. the defense in particular getting back on track. to the BYU fans that are here, Love you guys. Let's go get this dub. let's beat the Sun Devils on Halloween. Fan life chose me. You gotta ride the highs and the lows, right? Don't fall off the wagon. Don't fall off the wagon. go coops for life, baby. Let's go get this dub, get the train back on the tracks. Let's go.