while ignoring the other factors that occured over the same time. And its the dumbest argument.

BYU recruiting rankings would be the same or likely worse if we were still in the MWC. Not one athlete who didn't choose us, would have if we were still in that conference. Not one. Its more likely we would have lost some of the ones we have received, if we were still there.

The real reason the rankings have dropped, is because the P5 vs everyone else gap has significantly widened in the past 10 years, and because Utah won the lottery and got into a P5 conference. Those are what caused our recruiting rankings to drop. We started losing more higher ranked LDS athletes to other P5 schools, especially utah, but also more to USC, UCLA, Stanford, Oregon, Washington and ASU. Prior to the P5 re-alignment, we had a better chance of landing those higher ranked athletes.

Add in more scrutiny and microscope to HC infractions due to social media and internet usage, and players are a lot more concerned with playing at school like BYU then they were 10 years ago. And academically BYU is a more challenging institution then it was 10 years ago. Its harder to get into and perform well, which has also been a factor in recruiting rankings.

Maybe if we put a better product on the field in the past 10 years, we might have picked up a few recruits, but you can't look at the losses we've had over the past 10 years, and say that being independent has caused that either. Every year we've lost to inferior programs and had injuries against G5 schools, so you can't really make the argument that being Indy has made our record significantly worse either.

The drop in rankings and going indy happened over the same time, but being Independant is not the cause.