Kalani has embraced "the analytics", which sounds sensible, but based on the way we have operated I wonder whether they really understand the data enough to sensibly apply it. Some examples:

Drop 8

KS and Tuiaki (and maybe Lamb) seem to have found some data that indicate most college offenses are mistake-prone enough that if you bend-don't-break they will eventually stop themselves. It's not hard to imagine data that would support this. So they follow the numbers and drop 8.

The problem with this approach is that no capable player wants to play in such a scheme, especially on the DL. So if you could hold player quality fixed it might be true, but you can't recruit the same players. Of course you don't see this until several years into the experiment.

4th down conversions

KS knows that analytics indicate coaches are too reluctant to go for it on 4th down, so we stay aggressive and go for it on many borderline 4th down situations.

The problem is that we are not the average team. Our OL + RBs this year have proven to be very poor at short yardage. This is true on 3rd and especially 4th downs. We seem to have mistaken analytics applied across all teams for some insight into our team, and we all know the poor results

Recruiting focus on diamonds-in-the-rough

If you look at BYUs players who have contributed there is only a weak relationship to recruiting hype.  We have had many top recruits who have done nothing, and many who were lightly recruited have turned into stars.  KS and Lamb recognize our unique position and challenges in recruiting top guys and see the analytics leading them to focus efforts on evaluation vs chasing the same guys as everyone else.  Lamb has seen this be successful at the FCS level

The problem is that we are not FCS, and top players want to play with other top players.  Recruiting has a lot of inertia to it.  Fair or not, top players care about who else has committed to the school, and how prominent they are.  They don't want to go to a school with a bunch of nobodies, and if you somehow convince them to come, they may not stay since they are joining a program where "stars" are less valued.  So the ones that do join are less likely to stick around for those early years when they're playing behind nobodies.

I'm sure there are other examples, but when I hear our coaches speak I worry they may not understand the analytics enough to properly apply them, and it has led them to a worse place than if they ignored them and used their own experience/intuition.  I am all for trying to be different - we have to - but our grounds for doing so should be more than just "the analytics" say so.  Here's hoping Jay Hill can help us think through these things a bit more clearly

Edit:  Jacob points out another one - kickoffs that land near the goal-line instead of going for a touchback.  See the decision to keep kicking it to the USF returner who finally housed one on us.  He was their best weapon, our defense had their offense locked down, but because Lamb had seen analytics suggesting that touchbacks were not optimal we kept kicking to him.  Myopic.