At the start of this season, before Taysom or Jamaal went down, I told Mike Middleton that I only knew of one game on the schedule that was a sure win. That was Wagner. As far as I was concerned, the rest of them could have easily gone either way. Here we are at the end of this season with a 9 and 3 record having gone without Taysom for all but the first half of the first game and without Jamaal for the whole year. Of the three games we lost, BYU making one more play in two of them would have earned the win. In my opinion, BYU did extraordinarily well this year and I would have said that if Jamaal and Taysom had been available and had played up to the top of their talent. To have this record with the top two performers in the offense gone all season, the best player on defense gone for one of our closest losses, and a true freshman RM at quarterback speaks incredibly well for what Bronco did with what he had this year. He and the team performed a great deal better than my most blue-goggled expectations considered possible.

Those of you who want to knock Bronco and this team, I suggest you remember back to the start of this year and how daunting this schedule looked. Having come out of it 9 and 3 is truly a testament to a great effort on the part of both the coaches and the team. Consider yourselves very lucky to have a man of this caliber leading this program. We won't have him forever. Once he's gone, I think we'll be looking back to his coaching tenure as having been the second coming of BYU's glory years.