We're a quirky religious school owned by one of the strictest and least understood religious sects in North America. We're located in the middle of the intermountain west, far from the fertile recruiting grounds of California, Texas, Florida, and the major population centers of the east or the Midwest. We are not officially (or otherwise) affiliated with any of the "power" conferences. Our recruiting classes typically rank in the low 60's to high 40's. We have an incredibly strict honor code, and BYU is a rigorous and competitive academic environment. Most importantly, the demographic of the LDS church doesn't produce enough of the types of athletes we would need to be competitive at the highest levels of major college football.

Why on earth should we expect BYU to field a perennial top 25 football team?

What metric, what quantitative measure, what advantage can you point to that would persuade me to believe that we should be competitive with the perennial top 25 college football powers?