BYU Football: Cougars look to shock the nation in 2019
By Zach Bigalke
After nearly a decade of independence, BYU football is still looking to break out. Can they make waves on the 35th anniversary of the school’s national title?
To most people, 1984 conjures up the classic Orwell novel. For college football fans, a mention of that year brings to mind the moment when the sport turned on its head and crowned a mid-major as the national champion.
BYU’s perfect run that season, culminating in a Holiday Bowl victory over Michigan, gave the Cougars a benchmark the school would strive to rediscover for the next three-plus decades. In the interim, conferences gained primacy as the power brokers of the sport. They collaborated to frame new systems that would effectively freeze out the BYUs of the world from stealing away another title.
A 13-1 run in 1996 garnered little attention for the WAC champions. Beating Kansas State in the Cotton Bowl was small consolation for a team whose only loss came against a nine-win Washington side that finished second behind Arizona State in the Pac-10. BYU finished No. 5 in the polls, but they would have had a legitimate argument for inclusion in a playoff.
Five years later, a 72-45 loss in non-conference play at Hawaii in the regular-season finale was the only blemish for a 12-1 Cougars side that had pretensions on busting into the BCS. Instead, they were frozen out of the at-large bid in favor of a 9-2 Florida side that finished second in the SEC East.
After coming close but dropping a few critical games in 2006, 2007 and 2009, the school started to assess a change. Looking to become the Mormon equivalent of Notre Dame, BYU said goodbye to the Mountain West and struck out as an independent about 20 years after it ceased to be a path toward relevance.
So far the experiment has yielded mixed results. Can the Cougars ride a front-loaded schedule to the season they’ve dreamed about since setting out solo? Keep reading for a breakdown of the offense and defense before a dive into the Cougars’ schedule and an assessment of how things might turn out in Provo this year.