However, when it's early into a season, the PPG stat can be misleading. The '08 defense was pretty awesome in the PPG stat through 4 games, but there were certainly cracks in the armor when you looked at the other stats like total yards, yards per pass attempt, yards per carry, etc.


When we look at the current BYU defense, we're doing okay in the PPG stat. Can't complain too much about being in the top 25 in that stat, though the trend line isn't pointed in the right direction. We're giving up 278 passing yards a game. That's not a good stat, however, our opponents are only getting 5.8 yards per attempt. Now, it's not good that we're allowing them to attempt 47.5 passes a game, but we're doing a decent job containing those passes.

We were doing great rushing defense wise until UVA. You'd like to see the YPC for the opponent around 3.5 or below. We were holding opponents to 2.06 YPC entering the UVA game, but surrendered a 4.36 YPC to them. That increased our YPC allowed to 2.88, which is still very good, just the trend line is bad.


The biggest thing I take out of all of this is we struggled finishing off an opponents drive vs Houston and UVA. Neither opponent was allowed to truly gash us, which is good, but we failed to get off the field on 3rd down, which is bad. If we can shore up our 3rd down defense, they should still be pretty good this year.