the 1960s, and through it all, I still knew that BYU would right the ship. There were coaching problems, sure, there were players that weren't panning out, sure, but I knew that eventually they'd become BYU football again. I wasn't there to see it in person - the last play I saw at BYU, I was no more than 30 feet away from Mike Reed's outstretched fingertips...and 29 1/2 feet from the ball - but they became BYU football again, like I knew they would.

I honestly and analytically, absent any overreaction from tonight's result, have no such notion that BYU football will be back. There is simply no equation that adds up to BYU being on anything but an inescapably downward trajectory. We'll have "up" years where we beat 8ish teams - one might even be a P5 every once in a while - and we'll have down seasons where we'll have to cash in that FCS win to be eligible for that pre-christmas, worknight, $750,000 actually-losing-money-on-this-thing bowl game, that we'd be going to in either scenario.

Then with the cord cutters, broadcasting dollars will shrink, making our budgets worse and worse. We take more and more "payout" twofers, and just lose that much more often.

Then the P5 teams won't schedule us. It'll be their moral obligation to punish the evil Mormons for not embracing every vile and worldly practice celebrated on their campuses. The G5s still will, but only because as tight as our money is, their money situation is worse.

After a few seasons of the Athletics Department operating in the red, and the BoT members receive their 100th strongly-worded letter that tithing shouldn't be used for kids to play sports, it'll all just go away.

I DON'T WANT THIS TO HAPPEN. But no matter how I crunch the numbers, the outcome is still the same.