But it's also possible that you're wrong. Maybe recruiting falls off terribly and you're consistently like 90 if you go to a G5 conference, but I still think you get the 1/7 Utah LDS kids every year. The guys like Mangum and Heaps all still come to BYU if you have a good stable coaching staff that can recruit well, because they really want to play at BYU. That's where they want to be, as long as there's not a really good reason not to go to BYU. Sometimes that happens because of depth charts, or big offers from P5 schools, but I think the same would be true if BYU was in the MWC.

Your 4 games against P5 schools on ESPN don't change those kids minds, one way or the other. Maybe BYU stays right where it has been since independence, a mid 60s recruiting team (right on par with most of the top G5 teams) that gets the occasional LDS diamond because it's the Church school. I think that's likely, but we're both kind of guessing here. Being good (8-9 wins) in a G5 means you're a couple wins away from a NY6 bowl, which is a big incentive for recruits. You can't sell recruits the same thing if you're independent. Now maybe the downsides of the MWC outweigh that. That's obviously what you think, and you certainly could be right. But you also could be wrong.