San Francisco, San Diego, Pacific, and Pepperdine by 20 points?

When you set aside the the fact that our arena is orders of magnitude larger than theirs, and that our fan base makes theirs look positively Lilliputian, what specific on the court matchups favor BYU to the tune of 20 points a game?

Are our players more athletic than those teams players? Are we bigger/longer/stronger across the board than they are? Do our players possess uncommon skill that players in those programs don’t possess?

The reality is that this BYU team only has two consistently good players on its roster. We are undersized at the 4 and the 5 and we match up poorly with most big men in this conference. Our guards not named Elijah Bryant are inconsistent on both offense and defense, and often can’t hit the Pacific Ocean from beyond the 3 point line.

When we play teams like Pacific and Pepperdine, you can’t help but realize how unathletic most of our lineup is (Haws and Seljaas are abused by opposing players). When we play teams like San Diego and San Francisco one can’t help but see how outmatched we are in the post by most D1 basketball teams.

I’m amazed by the level of arrogance and hubris displayed by many BYU fans. It blinds them to the truth. San Francisco, Pepperdine, San Diego and Pacific have the same number of scholarship athletes on their rosters that BYU does. Moreover, they don’t have to contend with the limitations in recruiting that we do, and they don’t have to deal with the disruption and discontinuity to their lineups that the mission program causes at BYU.

BYU fans need to get over themselves. We’ve been consistently dropping games to WCC also-rams because we aren’t that much better than they are. These losses aren’t flukes. Any one of them can have a good game and beat us on any given day. Get used to it and stop acting like we’re heads and shoulders better than the middle and bottom of the WCC. We’re not.