This is the story of my last season of BYU intramural football. And actually, after reading mikecito's post, I realized my last season serves as a pretty good BYU football analogy too.

My last season was the best one. My friends and I had been playing intramurals throughout college, but this last season was different. For one, only one of us was actually a student. The rest of us were graduated, married, and in one case already had a kid.

Second, we had the best team name in the history of intramurals. Our team name was "Blackopintobeans?" The name was an homage to the legendary Cafe Rio question (we always insisted the question mark be included in every printing of our name--we were all about branding).

Third, we had the best look. We ordered a bunch of oversized $5 polos online and, tucked in, they became our official team uniform.

Finally, we were serious. We were determined to go out on top. We had an offense built for flag football success: It was a two-QB, option-based offense. Our primary QB (who is a CBer, but I'll let him identify himself if he wants) was phenomenal. He gave us a simple route system that let him call plays right at the line (and gave me a special double-move route that always worked). If he felt too much pressure, he'd just toss it to our other QB who was always able to run or find an open guy. On defense we played a cover-two zone designed to take advantage of the youngsters' need to prove how macho they are by throwing long bombs all the time. I was a safety, and the other safety and I would just sit back and pick off long balls all day long.

Our games were the most fun I've ever had as an adult. We'd show up in our polos, break the huddle by shouting our team name (always inflecting our voices upward to respect the question), and just steamroll whoever was on the other side for the next 50 minutes. It didn't matter who we were playing: Former HS football players, young whippersnappers, dudes trying to impress their fat little girlfriends, we killed them all. And it was especially satisfying because no one would ever think, looking at us, that we had any business on a football field. We were old, married, slow, out of shape and not particularly good looking.

One of our opposing QBs got so upset at our antics that he called out, in frustration, "what are you guys, like 30?!" We still laugh about that today.

Anyway, we crushed every team on our schedule. A perfectly undefeated season. But this presented a problem. As a former intramural official myself, I knew that the officials and the game managers huddle together after every game and give the teams a ranking, 1-5, based on their performance. By beating our opponents so savagely, I knew that we'd be getting high rankings, and surely a higher division placement in the playoffs.

At this time I need to acknowledge that, while we were beating the teams on our schedule quite handily, we definitely belonged in a lower division. As good as we were, we knew our limits. We did not belong in the top division. We pled our case after the season ended, but to no avail. We were moved into the top division for the playoffs.

And we promptly lost our first game in the tournament.

A glorious, immensely fun football season came to a crushing, heartbreaking end. All because we played out of our league. A cautionary tale for BYU football indeed (actually, I was mostly just interested in writing about that last season, which I loved so much).