Look, we got destroyed--absolutely obliterated--by three good-but-not-great teams and one great one.
In addition to that, we utterly choked in the last two games--once with one of the all-time most terrible and costly plays in modern BYU football history and a week later with one of our worst collapses in a half of football.
It happened. I saw too much of it in person. Some of what we witnessed last year was as bad of football as has been on display since Lavell arrived in Provo, and that's no exageration.
Some of our losses the prior year--Oregon, Arkansas, Liberty (yep, saw all three in person. Hooray for me) and ECU at home were just as bad.
We have the same head coach and OC as the last two years, and in large part, much of the same talent and/or level of talent that delivered the above results. Except at QB, which is certainly worse than in '22 and could be as bad or worse than '23. Vegas, sportswriters, and college football coaches all see our dilemma--NONE of them think we'll be very good.
Your post essentially offers the blue-tinted counterpoint to a bunch critiques made of our team. You may well be right in places. I hope you're right in a lot of them and that it carries us to 7-5. I will of course hope for better. But given the product BYU has put on the field of late, it isn't wrongheaded, much less ridiculous to predict another subpar season. It's up to BYU football to put up or shutup if we are in fact better than pundits, odds makers and coaches predict.