Special Teams Player of the Year: #44 Will Ferrin
With all due respect to Parker Kingston and consensus All-American Keelan Marion, each of whom had two returns for touchdowns in 2024, this was a surprisingly easy choice. Will Ferrin just had the greatest season by a kicker in the history of BYU football. He made a program record 24/27 field goal attempts—including a program record 16 straight to end the season—and made all 41 of his PAT tries. He also executed both a flawless surprise onside kick against Colorado and an epic double-snap fake field goal against UCF. But the highlight of the season for "Big Game Bill" came when he was called upon to attempt a game-winning field goal in BYU's Holy War matchup with Utah. As the Cougar offense prepared to run one final play to set up the kick, special teams coordinator Kelly Poppinga reportedly asked Ferrin where he wanted the ball positioned on the field. With a maniacal grin on his face, Ferrin responded that the angle didn't matter—he would make the kick regardless. And then he did, making the 44-yard game-winning field goal look as effortless as a PAT. As he crowd-surfed with fans in Provo following the win, it became clear that Big Game Bill had transcended the usual role of a placekicker—a relative nobody who really only gets attention if he underperforms—and had become a genuine star on this team. His precision, power, and reliability in big moments have made him absolutely indispensable, and I'm so glad he has another year of eligibility.
Defensive Player of the Year: #16 Isaiah Glasker
Incredibly, on a senior-heavy and star-studded BYU defense, Isaiah Glasker was the Cougars' best player this year as a redshirt sophomore. And he came out of nowhere, at least from an outside perspective—having only appeared sparingly in three games last season, he wasn't on my radar at all this year as a potential standout. But stand out he did, racking up a team-high 70 total tackles, 14.5 TFLs, 3.5 sacks, 4 pass breakups, and 3 interceptions, including a pick-six against Arizona. He was a human missile on the field, playing with what looked like reckless abandon but was actually carefully choreographed aggression within Jay Hill's defensive scheme. Glasker was awesome this year. His numbers don't even really do his performance justice compared to other recent linebackers at BYU—players like Ben Bywater and Max Tooley had their tackle statistics somewhat inflated by Ilaisa Tuiaki's much softer run defense, which frequently required linebackers to make second-level tackles that Glasker hasn't had to make as often. In any case, Glasker was showered with accolades after the season, being named Alamo Bowl Defensive MVP, College Football Network 1st Team All-Big 12, and a Sports Illustrated Honorable Mention All-American. And once again, he was a sophomore this year. The most exciting part of his performance in 2024 is what it tells us about the things he could do in 2025.
Honorable Mention: #0 Jakob Robinson
There were a number of guys who I could have put in this spot—for example, Tyler Batty had a phenomenal senior year at defensive end, and linebacker Jack Kelly was somewhere on virtually every outlet's All-Big 12 lists. But I had to give a nod to a guy who, at this point, has an unexpectedly strong case for being the greatest cornerback in BYU football history. Since transferring from Utah State as a redshirt freshman what feels like an eternity ago (for the 2021 season, to be specific), Robinson has contributed for the Cougars at a consistently elite level. His eleven career interceptions rank fifth among active FBS players—he followed up a four-pick season last year with three more in 2024, despite his overall targets dropping significantly as teams simply stopped throwing in his direction. Unfortunately, in that sense, he was partially a victim of his own success—by guaranteeing that the ball would rarely be thrown in his direction, he robbed himself of the chance to chase BYU's career defensive back records. Jakob Robinson's dominance isn't the type that shows up in any one given stat, but he's been an incredible luxury at BYU over the years—he's drawn the hardest coverage assignments game after game and risen to the occasion each time. The 2025 cornerbacks room is shaping up to be fairly solid, but Robinson leaves some gargantuan shoes to fill.
Offensive Player of the Year: #27 LJ Martin
Two seasons into his BYU career, LJ Martin has settled comfortably into precisely the role pretty much everyone foresaw for him: a workhorse feature back in the mold of Tyler Allgeier. Unfortunately, injuries have prevented him from quite reaching Allgeier's level of consistent production, but that doesn't take away from what he accomplished this year. Whenever he entered the game, he instantly elevated the offense and was hands down BYU's best player on the field. Indeed, a lot of the Cougars' offensive struggles early in the season can be directly attributed to Martin being hurt for several games. I think the coaches brought him along a little carefully this season as a result of an injury history whose length keeps increasing at an alarming rate given that he's only a sophomore. If he can make it through an entire offseason healthy and start his 2025 campaign at full strength, we might finally see him get up to the 20 carries per game mark that would cement him as Tyler Allgeier's true successor, the next superstar running back at BYU.
Honorable Mention: #2 Chase Roberts
Ironically, I awarded LJ Martin and Chase Roberts my Offensive Player of the Year awards last season, too, but in reverse order. Roberts won the top spot last year after a dominant performance that was partly necessitated by BYU's complete inability to run the football—with an offensive line much better suited to pass protection than run blocking, he had the opportunity to really stand out (relative to the Cougars' overall moribund offense). But as BYU improved significantly on offense this year, Roberts' role actually increased. He finished the season with 51 catches for 852 yards and 3 touchdowns and routinely served as a security blanket for Jake Retzlaff—when all else failed, Roberts was usually a safe target. Never was that more apparent than on BYU's final drive to set up the game-winning field goal against Utah, when Roberts made a spectacular diving grab on a poorly thrown 2nd-and-10 deep ball to keep the offense moving. Roberts' superpower is turning bad throws into highlight plays. He was widely expected to declare for the NFL draft after his performance this season, but on December 22, he announced that he would, in fact, be coming back for his senior year. His BYU career to this point has been incredibly entertaining, and it will be exciting to see what he does for an encore!
Surprise of the Year: #63 Bruce Mitchell
If you didn't know who Bruce Mitchell was at the start of the season, you're not alone. A redshirt sophomore from tiny Oakley, Utah who came to BYU as a defensive lineman in the class of 2022, Mitchell might have been destined for the dustbin of BYU football history as yet another lightly-recruited "project" defender unwisely pursued by Ilaisa Tuiaki and Preston Hadley. But prior to this season, he was invited to make the switch from defense to offense, and that move changed everything. In the Cougars' Big 12 opener against Kansas State, Mitchell was rather unexpectedly slotted in as a starter at guard in place of the injured Austin Leausa and Sonny Makasini—and he played great! He played so well, in fact, that when starting center Connor Pay was injured in the first quarter of the Baylor game, Mitchell came in as the Cougars' center for the rest of the day and started every game until Pay returned against Kansas. And thanks to Pay's close mentorship, there was scarcely a drop in performance when Mitchell stepped into the starting job. Pay is now out of eligibility, and Mitchell is his most likely heir apparent as the Cougars' starting center. What an incredible transformation for a guy who was a defensive lineman buried on the depth chart at the start of spring ball.
Inspirational Story of the Year: #76 Caleb Etienne
Caleb Etienne transferred to BYU from Oklahoma State prior to the 2023 season after having started every game for the Cowboys at left tackle in 2022. His departure from Oklahoma State was...rocky, to say the least, with Cowboys head coach Mike Gundy explicitly calling him out and claiming that he had entered the portal because he knew he wouldn't be starting in 2023. Whether or not that claim was true (it's difficult to know, given Mike Gundy's rather bizarre history of press conference antics), that's a wild thing for a coach to say about a transferring player. It really felt like sour grapes at the time—like Gundy was lashing out because he was angry at losing his starting left tackle to the portal.
Unfortunately for Etienne, the situation he came into at BYU wasn't a whole lot better. Throughout this season, starting center Connor Pay in particular has repeatedly mentioned how utterly dysfunctional BYU's 2023 offensive line was under Darrell Funk's "leadership", recalling that Funk essentially didn't coach his players at all, expecting them to do the vast bulk of their development on their own time and creating a toxic, degrading environment. For someone like Etienne, who had just left a coaching staff he felt wasn't developing him well, it must have been immensely difficult to encounter pretty much the same problem at his next stop. Fortunately, as he did for Bruce Mitchell this year, Pay stepped in and took Etienne under his wing, helping him learn the Cougars' scheme and refine his technique.
Mercifully, Funk was fired following the O-line's disastrous 2023 season (a campaign in which Etienne started most of the games but played poorly overall), and his replacement, TJ Woods, set about rebuilding the unit. He quickly recognized that Etienne's imposing frame (6'8", 320 lbs) and natural talent were a great foundation for serious development. Under Woods' tutelage in the offseason, Etienne improved rapidly. By the beginning of the season, he had locked down the starting left tackle job. And as the season progressed, he got better and better—perceived as a fringe starter by many going into the season, he is now seen as a decently likely draft pick should he choose to enter the draft this year. That's a pretty amazing one-year turnaround for a player whose career looked like it was on the road to nowhere at this time last year. And most satisfying of all, Etienne had perhaps his best game of the season in the Cougars' home matchup against his former team, Oklahoma State, protecting Jake Retzlaff's blind side and helping the offense slice apart the Cowboys to win the game in dramatic fashion. Etienne was visibly emotional after that game, and it's hard to blame him. He's been through a lot. His career hasn't been easy. He grew into a starter at Oklahoma State, only to see his development plateau and his own head coach turn on him. But he bet on himself in the portal, and didn't give up on BYU when he found that the situation wasn't initially what he had wanted. Through it all, he never stopped working hard to prove the critics wrong and show that he could be great. And this year, it all finally came together. I'm really happy for him. Caleb Etienne represents the best of what it means to be a BYU Cougar.