...you compare first 3 yrs winning pct for KS with how Lavell and Bronco “ended up.” How they ended up, meaning after they had years of experience and time to learn from their mistakes, time to overcome the previous coach’s problems that they inherited, and time for their own recruits to replace all the previous coach’s recruits on the roster and in the pipeline, is measuring the finished Lavell/Bronco products against KS the newbie.

Both Bronco and Lavell had better win pct’s their first 3 yrs than KS did but neither played a similar caliber of schedule. KS has avg’d five p5 opponents per year while Lavell didn’t coach against his 5th major conference opponent until his 3rd year (he avg’d 2 major conference opponents per year). By the end of KS’s 3rd year he had already coached against 15 p5 teams. Bronco had a similarly light schedule as Lavell and avg’d 3 p5 conference opponents a year, almost half that of what KS had to face.

In looking at how each coach fared vs their p5 opponents during their first 3 yrs Lavell went 2-4, Bronco went 3-6 and KS went 5-10, all 3 had a .333 winning pct.

It’s way too early to objectively judge KS a failure because of one bad season. With 70-80% of each recruiting class going on a 2 yr mission before coming to BYU it takes an additional 2-3 yrs for a HC to get his own players on the field and that delays their reaching a competency and fitness level needed to impact the 2 deep. It takes a min 5 full seasons to reasonably see a HC’s imprint on a team at BYU. Bronco won big with Crowton’s recruits 2006-2009 but once they’d left after the 2009 season and 99.9% of the program was Bronco’s starting in 2010 we saw he couldn’t win at that same level with his own players. We’re still seeing KS flush the remnant of Bronco kids out of the program although I think KS is doing it quicker than would normally be expected. This coming season will give you a better idea of how good of a coach KS is.