In any given season, the quality of D1 (FBS & FCS) college football teams can be broadly categorized as elite, good, decent, bad, and terrible.

Elite teams are the national championship caliber, cream of the crop. In any given season, there are usually anywhere from 2 to 5 elite teams. These are almost always exclusively P5 teams (TCU in 2010 is arguably the only elite non-P5 team over the past 6 seasons and perhaps the only elite non-P5 in several decades).

The next best 20-25 teams are good teams (i.e., most of the teams that round out the top 25 at the end of the season). Typically, about 90% of these teams are P5. This year, such teams would include Michigan, UCLA, and Utah (at least before Booker went down). G5's in this catgory are possibly Houston and Temple.

Decent teams are more or less the middle of the top 100 (e.g., 30 to 70). Most of the middle and bottom half of P5 teams are in this category, along with 6-8 of the better G5 teams, the top 2-4 FCS teams, and, more often than not, BYU.

Bad teams are those in roughly the 70 to 120 range. The majority of G5 teams are in this category, along with a handful of bottom feeder P5 teams, and maybe 5 or 6 FCS teams.

Terrible teams are all the remaining D1 teams. These are mostly bottom feeder G5's and FCS teams.

I would argue that BYU has never had an elite team, including the 1984 national championship team (1984 just happened to be a very rare year when there were no elite teams). And BYU has only one win over an elite team in its history (Miami in 1990).

BYU typically has good teams when they have an upperclassman QB (with at least 10 starts under his belt) having at least borderline NFL potential and at least an average defense by BYU standards. Otherwise, BYU is almost always in the decent category. BYU is typically only bad when the QB situation and/or the coaching situation are an absolute dumpster fire without a stellar defense to compensate (which rarely happens at BYU).

Since 1979, BYU has been good in 1979-81, 1983-85, 1990-91 (sans the end of 1990), 1996, 2006, and 2009 (1989, 1994, 2001, and 2007 were borderline good). The overwhelming majority of the rest of the time BYU has been decent, with the occassional bad season (most notably 2002-04). BYU has not been terrible since pre-LaVell era.

This is not to suggest that I believe BYU should be satisfied with the status quo or that we should be content with decency as BYU's default setting (if anything, I believe that, going forward, it's going to be increasingly difficult for BYU to consistently field decent teams unless BYU joins a P5). Along those lines, I would argue that we are currently in the longest stretch since early in LaVell's tenure without at least a borderline good season under the above criteria (we haven't been better than decent since 2009).

Just trying to provide some context from someone who has followed BYU for a long time.