What do you do when you’re playing for BYU and you’re playing on the road, a place you haven’t won in almost a year? You don’t have a consistent running game, you have an offensive line that only occasionally makes a decent drive, and you can’t trust your quarterback because he treats the ball like a supply of heated nitroglycerin and throws it like he’s wrapped in duct tape and wearing boxing gloves? And that sets ball security in particular and offensive football as a whole back about a century?
They’re celebrating, that’s it.
You win.
They congratulate themselves and call the victory what Jake Retzlaff called it: “courageous.”
He could have used a word that rhymes with it.
Pssst. Shut up.
You rely on a strong performance from your defense and then, in a crucial moment at the end, you throw the ball to a backup running back with one of the coolest names in all of college football – Miles Davis – and take a big lead in this tight, chaotic game with everything on the line, and then you kick a field goal to win 18-15 over an opponent, SMU, that was favored by double digits.
And then your coach lies afterwards about the essence of what he just saw.
“It was a great game,” said Kalani Sitake.
At least that was half the truth.
“We need more productivity from our team,” he said.
That was the whole truth.
And so it is: BYU’s offensive players owe their defensive counterparts not only a ton of credit, but also a good chunk of their NIL money after what happened on that occasion in Texas. Five times the Mustangs found their way into the red zone and not once did they make it into the end zone, allowing them to score just six points and just five total field goals.
That rock-solid Cougars resistance forced three turnovers, recorded three sacks, made eight tackles for loss and secured a crucial non-conference win for a team that doesn’t quite know what it has, what it is, what it can be and what it will be. Losing that game would have added more doubt to the already existing abundance of uncertainty ahead of a Big 12 schedule that will push BYU to its limits in the weeks and months ahead.
Now there seems to be more hope, thanks to guys like Harrison Taggart, Blake Mangelson, Isaiah Glasker, Crew Wakley, Jack Kelly and the rest. Kudos to defensive coordinator Jay Hill, who despite suffering a heart attack just over a week ago, was there and led his tough guys. If that’s not tough on his subordinates, who knows what is.
If what BYU showed against SMU is indeed true, then previous concerns about certain deficiencies, such as rebounding from setbacks and defeating high-octane opposing offenses, and especially the inability to pressure the quarterback, can be safely put aside. Throughout the game, this defense forced SMU into uncomfortable situations, and the longer the matter went on, the more apparent it became that BYU needed some kind of one-handed masterpiece from that side of the ball to win.
As for the other side, my goodness, the Cougars’ offense was up and down most of the night. There were a few highlights, including a touchdown pass, but Retzlaff choked down a fumble and threw a couple of interceptions that looked like they came straight out of a bad comedian’s slapstick routine.
“In football, mistakes happen,” Sitake said, noting that the reality is a little easier with a win in the bag.
As pleased as the coach was with the “disruptive” nature of his defense, he is fully aware that the Cougars need to get better on offense or they will get ripped apart in the league. There are some football fundamentals that need to be improved – fundamentals like… you know, blocking and avoiding three-and-outs, holding out on offense, and the determination not to cause senseless turnovers.
The aforementioned running game was spotty at best, which can only be excused by the fact that starter LJ Martin injured his ankle early on, after just five runs, and was unable to return. Others tried to establish the running game, but Davis was the one who gave BYU the boost it needed, grabbing a pitch and rushing 37 yards on a late drive that set up the game-winning field goal.
“It was a tough game,” Sitake said. “… I like how we found our way to the win. We definitely need to play better, we know that, but we also need to celebrate the wins.”
The latter will be less likely to happen if the former remains unnoticed and undone.
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