Football is back, Cougar Nation! Or, more precisely, the BYU defense is back. The offense...well, the offense might still be stuck in the offseason. In what can only be described as one of the most bizarre games in recent BYU football history, the new-look Cougars opened the 2023 season at home against the Bearkats (not a typo) of Sam Houston State, a historical FCS powerhouse making the jump to FBS play this year. It wasn't, perhaps, the kind of season opener Cougar fans had hoped for or expected. Accustomed to high-flying offensive performances during the illustrious quarterback tenures of Zach Wilson and Jaren Hall, the the striped crowd at LaVell Edwards Stadium instead got a veritable slog. The Cougars and the Bearkats managed to take football back to the dark ages in a 14-0 BYU victory that raised far more questions than it answered. But with that being said, there's still plenty to take away from this game. Here are my thoughts.
The Good:
Following the defensive debacle that was the 2022 season, Kalani Sitake cleaned house. Defensive coordinator Ilaisa Tuiaki and his entire staff (save cornerbacks coach Jernaro Gilford) were shown the door, as was special teams coordinator and in-game personnel manager Ed Lamb. The BYU athletics department then opened its vault and started doling out the cash, signing Weber State HC Jay Hill to a massive contract as the Cougars' new defensive coordinator and adding a raft of additional new assistants: Kelly Poppinga as special teams coordinator and defensive ends coach, Justin Ena as linebackers coach, and Sione Po'uha as defensive tackles coach. Coach Po'uha in particular was a notable hire—the Cougars convinced the former Utah defensive line coach and Jets defensive tackle to come out of retirement and fix serious issues left behind by former D-line coach Preston Hadley.
So was it all worth it? Well, after one game, the answer appears to be a resounding yes! This BYU defense looked very different from the one we saw in 2022. The unit as a whole was more cohesive, rallying energetically to the ball on every down. Individual players were more aggressive, but also made fewer sloppy errors and committed fewer penalties. Sam Houston doesn't exactly feature a world-beating offense, but the Cougars made a lot of underwhelming offenses look great last year. It's nice to see such drastic improvement. Beyond that general assessment of the defense, I had some more specific observations as well:
This might be the best cornerback room in BYU football history. While BYU has produced great individual corners in the past, the current starting duo of Jakob Robinson and Eddie Heckard, plus Kamden Garrett at nickel, may well be the best overall collection of CB talent the Cougars have ever enjoyed. Robinson had two spectacularly athletic interceptions against Sam Houston and Heckard had one. Meanwhile, all three had massive hits in critical situations throughout the game. Jakob Robinson could make a case for being the best defensive player on the team right now, and his fellow corners aren't far behind him. So far, the decision to keep Jernaro Gilford as the lone holdover from the old staff seems justified. He's doing a remarkable job.
It was nice to see defensive players crashing into the backfield and causing havoc. The Cougars recorded six TFL's as a team, including one sack, and kept Sam Houston QB Keegan Shoemaker under almost constant pressure. He never got comfortable, and even when he managed to get an accurate pass off, he was often rewarded for his patience with a thunderous hit as he released the ball. How remarkable is that TFL stat? Well, during their four-game losing streak last year, the Cougars only recorded 11 TFL's over all four games. The difference in defensive effectiveness between this year and last year is, so far, astonishing.
The offense didn't do much in this game, as will be discussed later. One bright spot, though, was freshman running back LJ Martin. Martin was a highly-coveted recruit from the 2023 class who turned down the likes of Baylor, Texas Tech, Kansas State, and Stanford to sign with the Cougars, and he showed exactly why he was such a sought-after commodity against Sam Houston. On 16 carries, all in the final 17 minutes of the game, he rushed for 91 yards and basically singlehandedly engineered the Cougars' second TD drive. Having exhausted pretty much all other options, the BYU coaching staff essentially gave Martin the go-ahead to put the entire offense on his back, and he didn't disappoint. It's too early to say that a true freshman will supplant two sixth-year seniors to claim the starting RB spot, but Martin wouldn't be the first to do something like that—Jamaal Williams, perhaps the greatest RB in the history of BYU football, seized the starting job as a true freshman and, when healthy, never relinquished it.
Ryan Rehkow might not be entirely human. In a game where the punting became more exciting than the offense at certain points, Rehkow's booming leg might just have been the decisive factor. He consistently kept the Bearkats pinned deep in their own territory, making the defense's job much easier. The Cougars punted nine times against Sam Houston—for context, they only punted 43 times through the entire 13-game season last year, averaging barely over three punts per game—and Rehkow averaged a jaw-dropping 53.2 yards per punt (including punts of 67 and 65 yards). He was rewarded for his efforts with the Big 12 Special Teams Player of the Week and Ray Guy Punter of the Week awards.
A special shoutout needs to go to the Cougars' backup tight end, Mata'ava Ta'ase. A walk-on transfer from SUU who joined the team without fanfare in July, Ta'ase went from eighth to second string over the course of fall camp and earned significant playing time against Sam Houston, mostly as a lead blocker. After the game, though, it came out that Ta'ase's father had passed away just hours before kickoff. I can't imagine how difficult it must have been for him to try and pour his heart and soul into a football game hours after losing his dad, but he played with energy and made some great blocks. Cougar Nation joins in sending prayers and well-wishes to his family at a tragic time.
The bad:
It's time to talk about the BYU offense. I'm going to go over a few different specific observations I had about individual players and position groups, but as a whole, the offense looked discombobulated and lacked energy. That makes sense, to an extent. Seven of the Cougars' eleven offensive starters for this game arrived this offseason via the transfer portal; in total, the Cougars acquired twelve new offensive players in the portal. It's naturally going to take time for an offense that transfer-heavy to gel. That said, though, there were five transfers starting on the defense, too, and they had absolutely no trouble gelling. Something else was going on here.
The offense's issues began with the O-line. That's a sentence which, a week ago, I would never have believed I could write in 2023. This O-line might be (at least on paper) the most talented and experienced in school history. Left tackle Kingsley Suamataia is being talked about as a top-5 lineman in the nation and a first-round draft pick. Paul Maile, Caleb Etienne, Connor Pay, and Weylin Lapuaho have all been full-season starters at BYU or elsewhere. This group should have utterly dominated Sam Houston in the trenches. They didn't—at least not after the Cougars' first possession. That opening drive lasted a workmanlike 2:54 and featured hard running by both Aidan Robbins and Kedon Slovis himself, who scored his first career rushing TD to cap off a veritable masterclass in efficient offense. And then...the O-line apparently decided to take the rest of the game off. From that point until late in the 4th quarter, the Cougars struggled to move the ball at all. And particularly for the rest of the first half, they could get nothing going in the run game in part because of lazy downhill blocking by the line. Trevor Matich, the starting center on the Cougars' 1984 national championship team and a commentator for ESPN, blasted the line's lack of effort in his postgame analysis. To anyone watching the game, it was clear that the Cougars were getting outworked in the trenches by a less talented, but gritty and determined, defense. The O-line did manage to put things together more effectively after halftime and create some nice holes for LJ Martin, but their pass blocking was never better than so-so and the offense only really found its rhythm on one second-half TD drive—a drive which was only even kept alive by an offsides penalty on a 4th-and-6 FG attempt. If this BYU offense is ever going to live up to its enormous on-paper potential and history of success, the O-line needs to improve its energy and precision drastically.
The best that can be said for Kedon Slovis against Sam Houston is that he played like a veteran, in the sense that he didn't ever lose his cool or make any really dumb mistakes. He made all the easy throws—his passing numbers were hurt by several throwaways caused by poor pass protection. He kept things under control and avoided turnovers. But just avoiding mistakes is only half of being a great quarterback. As the team's leader on the field, the quarterback is largely responsible for maintaining an offense's rhythm and energy. While there's a lot that goes into nebulous concepts like "rhythm" in football, a quarterback has to be able to make the plays that keep the offense moving and get the other players into a groove. Slovis didn't quite manage to do that. The playcalling and the efforts of the offensive line left a lot to be desired, but at the end of the day, a team has to be able to rely on its 5th-year senior quarterback to make some plays when the offense is struggling. Slovis played things abundantly safe, but that approach prevented him from being really effective.
LJ Martin really stuck out in this game. 91 yards in less than 1.5 quarters was an incredible performance. Unfortunately, the rest of the RB room was very disappointing. Aidan Robbins had a nice first drive and then did nothing of note the rest of the game. Deion Smith got four touches and gained a total of four yards. Yikes. That wasn't entirely the fault of Robbins and Smith—some of the O-line's worst play came while those two were getting all the carries. By the time the line figured things out, the coaching staff had already moved on to Martin. Like I said before, I don't expect Martin to completely supplant Robbins and Smith anytime soon. But the Cougars badly need more from their top two backs.
The receivers room mostly gets an "incomplete" for this game, because the Cougars' top two WR's, Keanu Hill and Kody Epps, were both held out with lingering injuries. But it's worth pointing out, simply because multiple former players have, that the receivers' downfield blocking left a lot to be desired against Sam Houston. When there was decent blocking, the Cougars were able to spring a couple nice chunk plays. But most of the time, there were missed blocks and low-effort plays galore. Like much of the Cougars' offense, this group of receivers was cobbled together in the portal—BYU's top two wideouts in this game were transfers Darius Lassiter and Keelan Marion. As the group continues to mesh and as transfers get more comfortable in Aaron Roderick's scheme, I hope these issues will be ironed out quickly.
Well, I've gone on enough about this game. At the end of the day, all that really matters is that BYU's Big 12 era has started 1-0. Next week is a tune-up for the Cougars, as FCS foe Southern Utah comes to town for a midday game that should hopefully allow the offense to fix some of the issues that showed up against Sam Houston. I have no doubt that they will. Meanwhile, if the defense can continue the level of play we saw against the Bearkats, the Cougars could cause some trouble for Big 12 opponents this year.