BYU was "good enough" to win any of their games and 'bad enough' to lose almost any of them. BYU was a 7-6 mediocre team and not clearly better than Hawaii or SDSU. I paid a lot of attention to both of those teams, as well as the MWC, last season for some obvious reasons and said pretty early on that BYU was no guaranty to beat any of them if they played, and in the end BYU didn't beat either of them. Despite being in the conferences they are in neither Tennessee or USC proved to be all that good, they were OK, so we overrate those wins for some reason. Yes they were good wins. neither team was a great team.

In the case of Hawaii specifically BYU was clearly less talented at the QB and WR positions and probably at RB as well. BYU's Dline was nothing special and their DB's weren't anything great either, they had no clear advantage at those positions.