they started to come back down to earth. From 2002-2012 they lost 15 games over 11 seasons. Most of their gaudy win totals came versus a WAC schedule. With Peterson gone and playing in the MWC, they're a very good, but not dominant team.

Boise may be the poster child for why being in a G5 conference doesn't work. Sure, you can go undefeated through the regular season four times against generally weaker competition (Boise did this in 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2009), but your reward for the perfect season is possibly a BCS/NY6 bowl, but maybe not even that (they got the Liberty bowl in 2004 and the Poinsettia Bowl in 2008). Even after their perfect seasons with a bowl win (2006 and 2009), the highest they ever finished ranked was #4.

If BYU wants to do that (assuming they can put good but not great teams together), all we have to do is dumb down the schedule a little bit. We don't have to join a G5 conference to schedule a bunch of MWC/WAC type teams to artificially inflate win totals and get in the "conversation" for a possible NY6 game.

Take 2011 for example. We had wins over Ole Miss and Oregon State (two teams who coincidentally Boise played OOC in the 2010s). We lost to Utah, TCU, and Texas. If you were to drop those three games off our schedule and replace them with WAC/AAC/MWC teams, we probably win those games and go undefeated that year. We probably end up ranked somewhere between #6-#10, and maybe or maybe not get a NY6 type bowl (but probably not). That's been Boise's recipe for success the past decade and a half.