Wrubell broke down all the defensive stats a couple weeks ago and there are some glaring weaknesses - disruption being a key as you mention. They’ve been terrible at creating big plays - TOs, Sacks, etc. They give up yards and don’t get teams off the field. But there were a few bright spots. They were actually surprisingly good at their Red Zone TD defense, somewhere around the top 30 in the country as of two weeks ago. They’ve done a good job keeping people out of the end zone once they are in the red zone and limiting points. And despite the overall trend of not getting stops, there have actually been a handful of games where they held the opposing teams well below their average yards per game. I could go on and on, but if you look at the overall defensive efficiency which takes SOS and garbage time into account, we ranked in the 60s-70s. Again, I’m not disputing anything you said, you are correct that the defense has not been good and has been downright bad at certain things. When you break it down game by game they have been good enough to get us to 6-7 wins. Not good, but not historically bad if you compare them to some of the bad defenses of the last 30 years. They are on par with some of our bad defenses of the past.

The offense on the other hand has been historically bad. There are really no words for how bad they have been across the board, even when Tanner was playing. There is really no precedent for just how terrible they are in modern BYU history.

So you are correct that the defense has not been great, but there is no question that the offense has been far worse. The UMass and USU losses are the most glaring games where the offense completely lost the game for us.