During the 1990's, BYU feasted on bad WAC teams, played mostly porous defense (with the exception of a few seasons), and saw the football program become stagnant later in the decade. The 90's weren't the "glory years" by any stretch of the imagination. Even the "good" seasons were somewhat frustrating.

The 1990 Heisman season was awesome, but that season still had the stupid loss to Oregon, the atrocious loss at Hawaii, and the bowl game beatdown. The 1991 comeback against SDSU was fun, but the fact that BYU had to score over 50 points just to tie a game was downright embarrassing. The tie to Iowa to cap Ty Detmer's amazing career was also kind of sad. The 1992-94 seasons were punctuated with bad bowl losses (a theme with most Lavell teams), and the 1995 team didn't even go to a bowl game. The 1990's also saw 5 losses to the Yewts--does 34-31 ring a bell?

1996 was an awesome year, and was the real hi-light of my time at BYU, but will always have the pain of what could have been as a result of a tough loss at Washington. After 1996, we saw the program clearly beginning to decline as Lavell and some of his staff began to wind down their careers. Recruiting was down, the Poly recruiting pipeline was in serious trouble, and the Yewts started to look respectable under MAFU. Some of the bowl games in the late 90's were seriously embarrassing--anybody remember getting stomped in the Liberty Bowl by Tulane, or losing to Marshall in the Motor City Bowl? As fans, we tend to romanticize history and treat the current regime pretty harshly, which I don't think is completely fair. When you strip everything away, there was only one exceptional season (1996), and a couple of awesome statistical years from Ty Detmer early in the decade.