...Anae earned his paychecks that year imo. Did a pretty good job working with a walk-on QB after Taysom got hurt. Too bad Bronco picked that year to go mental and hand the defense over to Nick Howell. Could've had a really good year with better defensive play.

#2) it's debatable that 2012 was a tougher schedule, it was more balanced but it didn't have the top heavy load of teams that 2017's schedule did. Oregon St was a quietly good team (went 9-4 while playing the #13th toughest SOS that year), ND was ranked (played the #21st toughest SOS), but Boise St and Utah St both played extremely easy schedules (#115 and #97) and were penalized for it (went to LVB and Potato Bowl despite winning 11 games each). The rest of the teams on the schedule were .500 or worse.

Opponents this year are tougher in general with a good possibility that 8 of BYU's opponents will go bowling this year compared to 5 in 2012. Also when you have an all time great defense carrying the team it makes it a heckuva lot easier on the QB and offense when they constantly are creating short fields.

Also, in 2012 it was too bad Bronco and Doman picked that year to go mental in going all in on Riley and not bothering to develop anyone else on the QB depth chart. We had 4 star recruits at BYU sitting and rotting on the bench, a 3 star transfer from Stanford get needlessly hurt for the rest of the season due to a coaching error and we didn't have use of a future NFL draft pick because he got Runn'd off by coaches a couple years before to clear the path for Riley. Just average QB play in 2012 would've delivered 3-4 more wins. Ruining the season with the best defense in BYU history was on Doman and Bronco and it ended up costing Doman his job and imo landed Bronco in hot water with Holmoe.

Back to 2017, as for the overall health of the offense, The OL has been very healthy as have the WR's but the TE position is a primary part of Ty's offense and depth wasn't good there to begin with but losing MLP, Marshall and Balderee hurt that group. The TE is as important to Ty's offense as the RB is to Anae's. Losing them forced Ty to convert a tackle to TE and he played considerable minutes as a result. Overall something like 13 starters are out for the year and 25 in the two deep. That's significant and I don't think you'll find a year like it in recent memory at BYU.

As for the bad games later in the year (ECU, etc) sometimes when it rains it pours. The only losing team I ever played on in all of my years in sports was when I was 13 playing Juniors in Little League. I ended up getting drafted on an expansion team and so we were a bunch of new players that kind of got thrown together. We weren't very good and things just seemed to get worse as the season progressed. I remember pitching one game and the bases were loaded and I got the batter to hit an easy chopper to the 2nd baseman. There were two outs and I thought "yes! we're getting out of the inning without any damage".

Then I watched the 2nd baseman let the ball roll under his mitt out into right field. The RF also let the ball roll under his mitt to the fence. A couple of throwing errors later the batter crossed home plate. Things snowballed from there and I ended up losing 22-1 despite only giving up 4 or 5 hits. I think a lot of responsibility falls onto Kalani (as much as I like him) and he's suffered for hiring so many guys he trusted who don't have coaching experience. It's contributed to a perfect storm of disastrous events, things they could control and things they couldn't. You've cherry picked out a year here or a year there where one event occurred that challenged prior coaches but you haven't picked out a single year where ALL of the cataclysmic events that the OP listed happened in the same year. It renders your argument moot.