Life is good. At the halfway point of the regular season BYU is 6-0, probably ranked #12 or #13 in the country when the polls come out today, and in good position to make the Big12 Championship game and even the College Football Playoff.

Seems to me it's a great time to re-examine the coaching discussions that dominated the offseason on Cougarboard.

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First - the Sitake defenders are of course feeling vindicated by the success of the season, and rightly so. A person would have to be out of their mind to want Sitake fired right now.

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But in another sense the Sitake defenders have been proven completely wrong: they argued all offseason that the Sitake critics were holding him to an unrealistic standard.

They pointed to Utah's rough transition to the Pac12 and said Sitake shouldn't be expected to do better.

They pointed to Lavell's losing record against P4 teams and said Sitake shouldn't be expected to be better.

They pointed to the Honor Code and some of BYU institutional challenges and said that given those, BYU can't be expected to be a top 15 team or be a serious contender in the CFP playoff.

None of those arguments look very smart right now.

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And ironically when it comes to those arguments, the Sitake critics look pretty smart right now - they argued it WAS realistic to expect BYU to do much better than it has the last couple of years, and it WAS reasonable to say BYU had been living beneath its privileges the last couple of years.

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Of course what the Sitake critics got dead wrong was assuming Sitake couldn't get us to 6-0 and into the top 15 in the country without the help of Covid. That talk seems crazy now.

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I'm still in the camp I've always been in - I DO think BYU should consistently be a Top 25 team, and consistently be in contention to make the Big12 championship game.

I DO think Sitake can deliver that, but only with great assistants.

We've seen if he has a terrible OC (as he did when he started), or a terrible DC (as he did for all but the past two years), or a terrible Oline coach (as we did the last two years), it can get ugly unless we have the "benefit" of Covid.

But if Sitake has a great team of assistants around him, he is actually the perfect leader of the program. Someone who universally is loved and revered as a disciple of Christ, someone who is the perfect embodiment of what BYU represents, and someone who can win.

The key to success isn't to fire Sitake. It's to demand excellence from his asistants, and pay them for it.

Just MyTwoCents.