From my POV, BYU fans were ok with 8-5 type seasons throughout the 90s as long as we could plausibly argue that we were better than Utah. That's not ok anymore because Utah is better.

I enjoy BYU football, but I haven't been really satisfied with our seasons, with a few exceptions ('96,'06,'07,'09) for nearly 25 years. Evidently a lot of fans, based on their posts, were just fine with those kinds of seasons as long as we were one step ahead of the Utes.

Here's a test question to check attitude. If it was guaranteed that BYU would have one less regular season win than Utah and you got to pick the number of wins for Utah, what number would you choose? IMO, anything other than '12' means you care way too much about Utah and not enough about BYU.