I’m not gonna apologize for calling out a context-free cherry picking that later benefitted from being rescued by actual analysis.
One takeaway appears to be that—in line with OPs theme—Independence has not materially benefitted BYU, but P5 has benefitted Utah. When you combine those two facts and pair BYU head to head against Utah, you get the results of BYU-Utah over the past decade. Those results are probably somewhat anomalous but also probably somewhat indicative of larger trends.