I've got to be honest, I didn't really expect BYU to beat Arizona State. And as the Cougars completely fell apart in the first half, conceding a 21-3 halftime deficit that should frankly have been worse than that, I was honestly pretty numb. I remember commenting at one point that all of the Big 12 Championship Game scenarios that everyone was posting were kind of meaningless to me because even if BYU somehow backed into the title game through tiebreaks, they looked likely to lose by 30 against any of the conference's best teams. I had genuinely made peace with BYU getting blown off the field in this game and probably collapsing for the rest of the season. The offense looked fundamentally broken and the defense looked exhausted and demoralized—and I had assumed a Zen-like ambivalence to it all.
And then, those blasted Cougars just had to go and make me care again. The BYU defense, which was gashed repeatedly in the first half, came out after halftime and pulled off a goal line stand that gave the offense the ball on the Cougars' own 4-yard line after a 4th down stop. Jake Retzlaff, who had looked confused and rattled in the first half, led the offense on a precise, methodical 96-yard scoring drive. Then, after ASU responded with another quick touchdown, the Cougars came right back with two more of their best-looking touchdown drives in weeks, reducing their deficit to just five points at 28-23. And after each of those drives, the defense stood firm, giving the ball back to the offense to keep the comeback alive. With just 1:30 to play, Jake Retzlaff had his team cruising down the field once again, with all of the game's momentum behind them. A game-winning score looked virtually inevitable. The Cardiac Cougars were about to do it again. But after overthrowing a wide-open Jojo Phillips on what would almost certainly have been a long touchdown, Retzlaff threw into heavy traffic over the middle and was picked off. The Cougars did get a one final weird shot at a Hail Mary (which required the clearing of a premature field-storming by the Sun Devil fans) thanks to ASU's quarterback being flagged for intentional grounding with one second on the clock, but while Chase Roberts actually caught the ball, he fell to the ground nowhere near the goal line.
I almost hate that BYU made this game close at the end. It would have been easier to just stay numb—as it was, this loss proved incredibly painful given how close the Cougars came to pulling off a miracle comeback. I would go so far as to say that other than a couple of mistakes, the second half of this game was the best complementary football BYU has played since the first half of the Baylor game—but because of the Cougars' first half struggles, it was all for naught. What is going on with the Cougars right now, and is any of it fixable in time for a meaningful postseason run? Here are some thoughts from a heartbreaking 28-23 BYU loss to Arizona State:
The Good:
It was a tale of two halves for BYU, and I'll be addressing the second half first. The Cougars' performance after halftime was strong in all phases, if ultimately futile. With the exception of the last two plays of BYU's final drive, Jake Retzlaff looked calm, collected, and decisive. He finished with 346 passing yards and a touchdown, though he did throw two picks. Jake's connection with his receivers has really improved over the course of this season; he shines on timing plays where he has to deliver the ball to an exact spot at the perfect moment, trusting the receiver to be there. In fact, such plays—a struggle for the Cougars early in the season—have now become the most reliable element of Aaron Roderick's passing offense. Chase Roberts and Darius Lassiter continue to shine for the Cougars, and each crossed the century mark in this game—Roberts had 6 catches for 108 yards, while Lassiter had 5 for 103. BYU has produced some great wide receivers over the past few seasons—the Nacua brothers, Dax Milne, Gunner Romney, and Neil Pau'u all come to mind—but I'm not sure the Cougars have had a duo at this kind of peak performance on the team at the same time in the Sitake era. BYU's general offensive struggles over the last couple of seasons have obscured just how spectacularly talented Roberts and Lassiter are—they're both bonified stars with strong NFL potential. There's talent behind them, too—Jojo Phillips caught a touchdown in this game, and Keelan Marion continued to show what a weapon his insane speed can be, scoring not one but two touchdowns on fly sweeps. My only worry with all of this wide receiver success is that (heaven forbid) Fesi Sitake could end up being poached this offseason—there are plenty of deep-pocketed programs out there who, I'm sure, would love to have a coach with his pedigree of wide receiver production.
The BYU defense struggled quite as much as the offense did in the first half, but also completely turned things around after halftime. Whether that was the result of Tyler Batty's fiery (and controversial) halftime speech or Jay Hill's usual intelligent adjustments—or a combination of the two—isn't totally clear. What is clear is that aside from one brutal pair of mistakes that gave up a quick ASU touchdown early in the second half, the BYU defense played essentially perfectly after halftime, repeatedly stopping the Sun Devils' potent offense and giving Jake Retzlaff and company plenty of opportunities to mount a comeback. The defense did everything it needed to in the second half to put the Cougars in a position to win the game. Tanner Wall, who is having a fantastic season as a walk-on, recorded his third interception of the year. Just a redshirt sophomore, he should be expected to be an anchor of the defensive backfield for BYU next season. Two other highlight performances came from a pair of linebackers: Isaiah Glasker, who had a massive 4th down stop late in the game and led the team with 12 tackles, and true freshman Miles Hall, who recorded six tackles and a forced fumble in only his third-ever game in a BYU uniform.
The Bad:
The first half of this game was a complete and total disaster in all phases (including special teams, where the Cougars were caught off guard by a surprise onside kick). Virtually nothing went well. I'm going to address the defense first, because I'm frankly less concerned about it. In its second season, Jay Hill's unit is young and not especially deep. A couple more years of Hill's recruiting should tell us a lot about where his defense is headed, but given how good it's looked against excellent offensive teams like SMU, Kansas State, and Kansas, I think its ceiling is pretty high. At its best, this defense has looked like one of the most dangerous in the P4. Unfortunately, it...wasn't at its best in this game. Not even close. Cam Skattebo did whatever he wanted in the first half and piled up 147 yards and 3 touchdowns for the game while barely looking like he was trying most of the time. The Cougars weren't gap-sound, had poor edge integrity, and failed to make tackles even when they got home in the backfield. I don't necessarily blame them for struggling with the devastating one-two punch of Skattebo's running and Sam Leavitt's arm, but I am a little concerned by how flat they looked to start the game. The BYU defense's energy level looked alarmingly low in the first half. There's no way around it—the Cougars lost the mental game. I'm not entirely sure what Kalani Sitake can do about that—Mark Pope recruited a cadre of sports psychologists to help the basketball team become more mentally focused last season; perhaps the football team could consider something similar. But in the here and now, the BYU defense needs to quickly shake off its disastrous performance against the Sun Devils and lock in for this week's all-important matchup with Houston. The red Cougars are one of the Big 12's worst teams—nowhere near as potent as the likes of ASU—but a defensive performance like the one BYU put on in the first half of this game would be problematic all the same.
I have a great deal more to say about the BYU offense in this game, because I think Aaron Roderick has fewer excuses than Jay Hill and has also had fewer good results to hang his hat on this season. Now in his fifth year as BYU's offensive coordinator (if you count 2020, where Jeff Grimes held the official OC title but the general understanding was that Roderick was the primary offensive decision-maker), Roderick seems to be stuck in a rut and digging himself deeper all the time. The Cougars are now working on three straight games of subpar offensive performances. Jake Retzlaff appears to actually be regressing as a quarterback rather than improving. The Cougars' exceptional group of pass-catchers, which (as I've already discussed) includes a historically great WR duo in Chase Roberts and Darius Lassiter, is being wasted by a scheme that fails to use it effectively.
ARod's feel for the game continues to be poor—despite the overwhelming evidence that Retzlaff plays better in a timing-based scheme at a high tempo, ARod continues to prefer a slow, plodding, grind-it-out offensive pace that relies on Retzlaff to read the field and run the offense in a way he's clearly not comfortable with. I have been vocal in my criticisms of ARod for a reason—quite frankly, I don't believe he's all that great of a coach. I think he coasted to success in his first couple of seasons with a pool of high-level talent that he deserves very little credit for bringing in; his own recruiting, meanwhile, has hovered steadily in mediocrity with few exceptions (most of which have come in the form of elite wide receivers who might logically be credited more to Fesi Sitake than ARod himself). Without the services of NFL-caliber players like Jaren Hall, Zach Wilson, Tyler Allgeier, Puka Nacua, Brady Christensen, and Blake Freeland (none of whom he recruited), ARod's offense has sputtered over the last couple of seasons. Winning fixes everything, and most fans, myself included, blithely gave him a pass as the Cougars raced out to a 9-0 record this season on the strength of an overperforming defense and rock-solid special teams play (with a healthy dose of mediocre defensive opponents to occasionally make the offense look good). But the fun is over. The emperor has no clothes. BYU's offense has looked flat-out awful in 6 of the last 7 halves it's played. In fact, at halftime of this game, the Cougars had scored just three touchdowns on their last 30 offensive possessions. What characterized that run of futility? A slow, grating pace and an over-reliance on Jake Retzlaff's precise game-management. And what allowed the Cougars to finally snap out of it and string together three straight touchdown drives against ASU after halftime? A fast offensive pace and lots of timing throws for Jake. Crazy, I know.
Look—ARod isn't getting fired during the season. He probably won't get fired after this season unless the Cougars completely implode and lose the Houston game and their bowl—and even then, I'm not sure Kalani would move on. But it's becoming blindingly obvious, at least to this program outsider, that the BYU offense is struggling far more than its depth and experience should predict. This BYU team has a defense and a defensive coordinator on the rise, as well as a special teams unit that ranks among the nation's best. Kalani Sitake is building a robust culture that guys want to play in. The one factor that seems to still be limiting this team's ceiling is, unfortunately, ARod. This team will go as far as ARod allows it to, and it doesn't seem like the College Football Playoff is a likely final destination.
But I'm not done here, because so many of my observations about ARod are tied to his management of Jake Retzlaff's limitations, and it would frankly be unfair to ARod if I were to just ignore that side of the offense's struggles. If you've been reading this blog throughout this season, you'll know that I've had questions about Jake for a while. His performances against SMU and Wyoming left me very concerned for how he might look in conference play. And while he performed well enough on paper for a while, that seems, in hindsight, to have been a bit of a smokescreen—the Cougars won a strange game against Kansas State where the offense only ran around 50 plays, collapsed completely in the second half against Baylor, and then faced two of the P4's worst defenses in Oklahoma State and UCF. So while BYU was winning games and Jake was putting up decent stats, there was never a sense that the offense was really in control of games or dominating the way it should have given the level of competition. And then, the Utah game happened and the house of cards came tumbling down. While the Cougars did beat the Utes, it wasn't because of anything the offense did especially well—one offensive touchdown generally isn't enough to win a game. That assertion was proven a week later against Kansas, as Jake and the BYU offense once again managed just a single touchdown—and this time, the defense and special teams couldn't quite make up for the offense's complete lack of production. The first half of this game was more of the same. So what is it about Jake Retzlaff that causes the offense to struggle? I can see three basic problems:
Mechanics — Jake's throwing motion has always been a rather ugly Travis Wilson-esque sidearm that lends itself to frequent bat-downs at the line of scrimmage and puts more pressure than normal on the offensive line. His footwork is also shaky and inconsistent. Jake's ungainly form, even on his best plays, presents a disappointing contrast with the precision dropbacks, flawless motion, and eye-popping arm talent that made Zach Wilson and Jaren Hall superstars and draft picks. Jake has plenty of arm strength and can be very accurate when not under pressure—he put up video game numbers at the junior college level for a reason—but in even slightly adverse circumstances (and sometimes for no apparent reason at all), his form falls apart.
Field Vision — It's becoming increasingly and painfully obvious that Jake struggles to read the field and understand what the defense is doing. I've lobbed plenty of criticism at ARod for his playcalling, but recently, an alarming number of failures by the offense have been the direct result of bad decisions at the line by Jake—the most obvious example being the interception at the end of the first half against Kansas, where he audibled into a fade to the tight end, then completely misread the route and threw the ball straight at a defender. Jake also routinely fails to see wide-open receivers during his progressions or else simply makes the wrong throw. It's a frightening thing to say about your starting quarterback eleven games into a season, but...I'm not sure Jake can actually read a defense. There's a reason the offense looks its best when it goes up-tempo and all of Jake's throws are timing-based—when he doesn't have to make a read, and simply has to put the ball in a specific, static location, he has the arm strength and accuracy to make even very difficult throws. But when (as has frequently happened over the last few games) Jake is asked to slow things down, assess the defense at the line of scrimmage, and go through progressions after the snap, he has really struggled.
Consistency — To some extent, this is a combination of the other two issues. Jake's mechanical problems and the fact that he seems to have trouble reading the field combine to cause jarring swings in his production. In any given game—on any given drive, even—it's virtually impossible to know whether good Jake or bad Jake will show up. He put together three of his best drives of the entire season in the second half of this game, but on that pivotal final drive, he whiffed on a long ball to a wide-open Jojo Phillips and then threw the (essentially) game-sealing interception one play later. Kedon Slovis struggled last year, but at least you always knew roughly what you were going to get from him—he was a game manager with enough of an arm to occasionally punish lazy coverage (though, for unrelated reasons, he was largely set up for failure, as was Jake upon replacing him). This year, Jake has looked decent at times—especially against lesser defensive teams—but has been brutally unreliable as the season has progressed.
I've spent a lot of time talking about the offense and Jake Retzlaff in this recap, and I recognize that my comments here might come off sounding a bit...vindictive? Hyper-critical, at least. The reason I'm so frustrated with the offense is that I feel like the rest of the team has largely found its groove as the season has gone on—the defense had a brutal first half in this game, but has mostly impressed in conference play against tough competition; meanwhile, the likes of Will Ferrin, Sam Vander Haar, and Keelan Marion have turned BYU's special teams into appointment viewing. The offense is the odd unit out here, and basically has the power to set BYU's ceiling for the rest of the season. What might that look like?
Well, the Cougars have one regular season game left—a home date with Houston. Houston stinks this year. The red Cougars somehow have two conference wins, one of which was an astonishing upset over Kansas State—which they followed up with a putrid 27-3 loss to bottom-feeder Arizona (a team BYU beat 41-19). Houston is bad bad, especially on offense—Jay Hill's unit should absolutely feast this week.
Assuming BYU beats Houston, which I think is likely, the blue Cougars are somehow not out of the crowded Big 12 title race yet. BYU no longer controls its own destiny, but still has better-than-even odds of making the championship game. In order for BYU to get in, the Cougars have to beat Houston and one of the following things must happen:
Any two of Arizona State, Colorado, and Iowa State lose—in which case BYU would play the one team of those three that wins.
Colorado and Iowa State win while Arizona State loses—in which case BYU would play Iowa State.
Arizona State and Colorado win while Iowa State loses—in which case BYU would play Arizona State. I consider this the most likely scenario of the three, since Arizona State and Colorado have relatively easy matchups with Arizona and Oklahoma State, respectively, while Iowa State plays a very good Kansas State team.
Even if the Cougars beat Houston this week, they will be left out of the championship game if all three of Arizona State, Colorado, and Iowa State win or if Colorado is the only one of those three to lose. (Bizarrely, even if BYU loses to Houston this week, there's a possibility that tiebreakers will still get them in if all three of those teams lose, though that's manifestly unlikely. The Big 12 is insane, y'all.)
Putting this season in perspective for a moment, a BYU victory over Houston would mean a 10-win season for a team that was widely predicted to miss a bowl game this year. Whether or not the tiebreaks put the Cougars into the Big 12 title game, that alone is an impressive achievement for which this entire team—offense, defense, and special teams—and the entire coaching staff deserves credit. I have been rather more harshly critical in this post than I generally am, but that's because this team has set an incredibly high bar for itself that nobody saw coming at the start of this season. If the Cougars do make the conference title game—which, itself, would once again be a phenomenal achievement for a team broadly picked to go 5-7 or worse—all kinds of crazy, chaotic things could happen. And if this BYU team could somehow find the guts to pull off a win against the Big 12's other top team in that game, the Cougars are still, incredibly, in line to participate in the College Football Playoff. This team still has a whole lot to play for, and we fans don't have to stop dreaming big just yet.