as there are three scenarios that could have happened:
1) Utah State has improved a lot and BYU has stayed flat
2) Utah State has improved some and BYU has deteriorated some
3) Utah State is the same crappy team it was 6 years ago and BYU football is a dumpster fire

He seemed to be claiming (3) by his disparaging remarks about USU throughout the article, but in reality it is somewhere between (1) and (2). Utah State had four 2-win seasons before Gary Andersen took over and now regularly win more than 10 per year. You can't observe a turn-around like that and still claim (3). Plus, BYU's independence has them playing a much harder schedule than when in the MWC (even taking into account the annual games with Utah and TCU), so you could argue that BYU is not much worse now than their MWC days.