You take a school with inherently high standards for personal living… add to that, you want recruits who have actual D1 potential… and you are suddenly left with a much smaller piece of the pie for all available D1 talent…

The second issue is that you have 100+ scholarships, and you have to manage those with a group of 20-25 players every year who are going to come and go depending on their mission status, and are going to come and go in different states of fitness and skills than you might have originally recruited them for… let’s face it, not every QB comes home from a mission ready to throw it over that hill…

And, unlike Alabama who recruits 100 guys who want to play at Alabama, and under the new rules, most would stay at Alabama their 4 years because well heck, it’s ALABAMA… but the rest if they were good enough to really COMPETE for #1 at their position and then fall short they seriously think about using the portal to go to a school where they think they’ll fill that QB1 slot…

At BYU? Nope, they go out, they come back and if they are a step or two slower, 20-30 pounds heavier, maybe more committed to finding a spouse than studying film, well heck, they have 3 years to get back in shape, paid for, and even if they don’t play much, they are getting a great education.,.. I’d bet truth be known, (just by my casual look at the roster and names that have played with a So or Jr next to them) there is 15-20% of the yearly roster that is in this category…

And above them, there is this group who love football, who work hard, who might not have been as good as they were in HS, but are still good enough to play a few down at BYU, but might start if they went to Utah Tech. And hey, a communications major is a communications major.

Point here is that people seem to be under the belief that the little group of 25 players we collect every year are future stars, or that they all CAN be… in reality, 5-10 of that 25 are going to see the field with any meaningful playing time on offense or defense over their 4 years of eligibility. Meaning that at any time, we only have 20-30 players who are worthy of playing time, and the rest are not like Alabama where 80-85 of their players could play meaningful downs.

And how you fill that gap of 40-50 players? Who fit the mold for playing at BYU? I don’t see it today, and to be honest, I don’t see it improving by more than 5-10 players on a permanent basis anytime soon.

And the rub is, it is this problem that kills us the last two years… you lose 5-10 of those players in your 20-30 player group, and suddenly you don’t have the right balance of experience, skills, and temperament to keep your offense or defense running…

And sadly, as pointed out before, being in the Big12 doesn’t fix a problem that has existed since before Lavell, and will continue after Kalani.