The last time we saw the Brigham Young University football team in these parts, the Cougars were just concluding the inaugural season of their curious adventure in independence.
With a 41-20 victory over UH at Aloha Stadium, BYU finished 10-3 in 2011. Now, as the Cougars wobble into Halawa on Saturday, they have the possibility of reaching double-digit losses for the first time in the school’s 95-year football history.
While it is independence, it isn’t progress, and the current 3-9 mark represents the most BYU losses in a season since 1955.
But it isn’t just this season’s deepening struggles that make you wonder why BYU continues to forsake the benefits of conference membership to bang its helmet against the wall of independence.
It is also the results. The seven seasons invested in the pursuit have not brought BYU an invitation from any of the five power conferences, have not resulted in a run at a national championship and have not delivered a top-tier bowl appearance. They haven’t even produced a victory over in-state rival Utah.
The drive to keep up with the Utes and the pique about being passed over by the power conferences helped fuel BYU’s exit from the Mountain West and head-long dive into independence in the first place.
Less than three months after the then-Pac-10 declined to offer the Cougars a seat at its table, sending invitations to Utah and Colorado instead, BYU declared its ambitions too lofty for the middling MWC and announced a departure for presumed greener pastures.
But while independence has worked for Notre Dame, it has been a different story for the church school in Provo, Utah. In the seven years before going independent, BYU was 61-27 (.693) with two conference championships. In the seven post-departure seasons the Cougars are 55-35 (.611).
After a loss or two BYU is already out of any longshot national title hopes and without major bowl possibilities. Nor is there a conference title to compete for.
Bronco Mendenhall, an early salesman of independence as BYU’s head coach, came to recognize the handwriting on the wall and admitted “I don’t think it is sustainable” on his way out the door to Virginia last year.
Among losing the in-state recruiting battle to Utah, a wider competition for the top Polynesian players and the school’s “honor code,” BYU is hard pressed to corral the kind of talent to excel at the levels to which it has aspired with independence.
This year’s plague of injuries, including the sidelining of quarterbacks Tanner Mangum and Beau Hoge, has exacerbated the situation.
As an independent BYU has had to cobble together what it can for schedules. And because most power conferences leave only early-season or narrow windows for nonconference games, the Cougars have had to bunch up their marquee opponents. That has resulted in gauntlets such as LSU, Utah and Wisconsin or Arizona, Utah, UCLA and West Virginia in succession. It has also meant late season fillers with Massachusetts that draw mostly yawns.
While BYU has gotten one thing it craved, increased TV appearances through its deal with ESPN (Saturday’s game is being shown by the CBS Sports Network here), there is a difference between exposure and being exposed. And the product the Cougars are putting on the field these days is definitely the latter.