Does anybody expect BYU to be good at either of the
 

money sports any time in the next few years?

I define this year's football season as mediocre, not meeting my modest expectations. 6 and 5 really isn't much of an improvement.

The losses to SDSU and Utah are inexplicable. Bronco didn't have the boys prepared, and Anae came up short when he failed to go to Brown in crunch time, relying instead upon Beck, who must not be relied upon in crunch time.

The problem with Beck is he wants to be relied upon, while he doesn't have to tools to do it consistently. Brown should have touched the ball more often during the last two drives and during overtime, but BYU threw the game away.

The basketball team losing its opener at home to LMU?

Right now, my confidence in BYU administration is at an all time low. Let's hope some day we may laugh at these days, but my interest is dimming fast.

When you factor in strength of schedule, I think you can make a case that this was a worse team than last year. Now, clearly the Offense has made tremendous improvement. But the defense declined so significantly that I think it's a wash as to which team was better.

I think we'll see softer schedules for a while and I think that's a good thing. I maintain that this has always been a part of our success. Beat the weak conference teams and beat a couple of BCS teams (who usually end up having a bad year). This allows us fans to argue that we can beat anybody and allows us to climb the top 25 year after year. The smartest thing our program did this year was to put EIU on the schedule. Just think of where we'd be sitting right now if they hadn't. Sure, we all bitched about it. Nobody wants to see that game. But now we're off to a bowl and the program is back on the radar to some extent, deserved or not.

This isn't a message designed to rag on BYU, it's an observation.

They went 5-6 last year, returned 17 starters, and improved to 6-5.

I know a lot of BYU fans have been critical of the way that Utah has been scheduling but I think Chris Hill has the right idea.

First include at least one team that is essentially a guaranteed win on your schedule in your OCC games. The Utah legislature has taken care of this one for the Utes with the annual game against Utah St.

Second schedule games against middle of the pack BcS schools who are willing to give you home/home series. This works well because you always will get some credit if you beat one of these schools. Also you never really know when you are going to get a good opponent out of this. For example when Utah scheduled UCLA they were down. Now the Utes will be playing a top 25 team to start the season next year. It is good to occassionally get one of these opponent.s

Third if you can get a top level non-BcS school that schedule that. This is probably you last priority but these can be good games.