HB Arnett’s
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West 800 South –
Vol. 35,
Issue 11 –October 6, 2014
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We are about to
find out!
Is the Go Fast, Go Hard Offense
Sustainable?
I read the following somewhere a couple of weeks ago.
BYU Offense Has
Huge HC Problem
Take a deep breath. HC doesn’t stand for Honor Code. It
stands for Hill Centric.
Taysom Hill is the BYU offense. Take
him out of the equation and there is no Cougar offense.
That is why I personally think this
Robert Anae offense will not be sustainable or viable in the near future.
As long as Anae has a HH (Healthy Hill) BYU will put up good to
great offensive numbers. But what happens when Hill is hurt or uses up his
eligibility?
Hill is a once-in-a-two-decade-type
talent. Take him away and this offense won’t be productive enough to make
any national noise. That’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it.
I hate it when ESPN announcers agree
with me. That is the ultimate insult, but even they pondered and pontificated about
what would happen to BYU this year if Taysom Hill was injured.
Okay, I actually wrote those words three weeks ago in Issue 8. I didn’t
expect to have an answer this soon, but with Hill now gone for the year and
maybe forever if he opts for the NFL this coming spring, the answer to who
replaces Hill is here and now.
The obvious, easiest and only answer for the present is Christian Stewart,
Hill’s current backup. An even scarier question is who replaces Stewart
for the remainder of this season if the senior backup signal caller takes an
unfortunate hit?
Pondering Pessimistically
That’s for more pessimistic minds than mine to ponder.
I actually think this Christian Stewart thing could be a blessing in
disguise for the future of BYU’s offense going forward.
Call me old fashioned or just a flatulent old guy, but I have watched
enough BYU football offensively to know that the Cougars are never going to out
talent the top tier schools playing this sport.
LaVell figured it out. You have to throw the ball to balance the
scales. This go fast, go hard stuff only worked because BYU had Taysom Hill. It
was never going to be a sustainable offense.
Now what?
The only practical skill Christian Stewart has is throwing the
football. He is definitely not Heisman material, but believe it or not, he is
Darrell Garretson material. If that name sounds familiar, it should. He is the
backup QB from
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are about to see what the BYU offense of the
future will look like this Thursday against
Bad Rap?
BYU coaches have taken the rap of not being able to adapt or adjust.
That reputation will either be chiseled in stone or erased during the rest of
this season.
I think Stewart will be serviceable throwing the football. If that
assessment is accurate and the Cougar brain trust adapts and adjusts the
offense to cater to his skill set, it bodes extremely well for the future when
the Cougars will have an extremely talented thrower on the roster next season
with the return of Tanner Mangum from his LDS mission.
I still stand by my earlier assessment of BYU having a bevy of talented
receivers. They just never got to showcase their talent with the way the offense
was run and dictated by Hill’s running skills.
The best Cougar receiver actually saw the field for the very first time
late in the game against
If the Cougar offense is going to be passing centric going forward,
then I think this week those same BYU coaches will realize that they need Kurtz
now and can’t wait for next season to utilize his talents.
I want to re-emphasize my statement that BYU will never be able to
recruit well enough to go toe-to-toe with the big boys of college football on offense.
Dents and Danced
History shows that when BYU did have its moments of glory on the
national stage, it was with a quarterback that could fling it. That assessment
has been backed up, in my opinion, by the other non big boy schools that made
dents and danced on the national stage.
For the little guys to compete with the big guys, you absolutely have
to have an NFL caliber thrower.
I think it will be proven that BYU has one in the pipeline with Mangum.
The sooner the offense gets adapted and adjusted to fit his skill set, the
better off BYU will be in the long run. Go fast, go hard has been fun with
Taysom Hill. Now it’s just time to go away.
Jim McMahon Hits the Coaching Nail on
the Head
Jim McMahon had his number retired last week in the BYU Hall of Fame.
It is a well deserved honor. He may not have known it at the time, but he also
hit the BYU coaching nail right on the head.
Here is some of what he said during his induction speech: “I want
to thank my coaches. I had some great coaches here. Doug Scovil. He’s the
best coach I’ve ever been around. I played in the NFL for 16 seasons and
nobody taught me as much as him.
My senior year I had Ted Tollner who came from
As McMahon so succinctly said, head coaches make good hires and bad
hires. Since it is highly unlikely that any future football hall of fame
inductee will be so outspoken and candid about Bronco Mendenhall’s hires,
somebody will have to do it for them.
I nominate me for the honor.
Let’s start with Bronco’s pedigree. He is a product from
the Rocky Long coaching tree at
In my opinion, Long, when going from coordinator to head coach, is the
epitome of The Peter Principle,
which states; "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise
to their level of incompetence".
Manager and Motivator
Like Long, Mendenhall has proven that he is an
outstanding defensive coordinator. He also is an outstanding manager and
motivator of players and quasi mission president of young LDS men who are on
his teams. But for me, from a strictly football point of view as the head coach
at BYU, I am still wavering between him being the perfect guy for the job or
the perfect Peter Principle.
I base most of that judgment by the coaches he has
surrounded himself with.
In Bronco’s first year as head coach in 2005, he
hired nobody. He inherited an entire staff from Crowton and also was given
Robert Anae. Anae was not Bronco’s hire but put on the payroll by the
administration before Mendenhall was even hired. That staff included Lance
Reynolds, Brandon Doman, Jeff Grimes, Patrick Higgins, Steve Kaufusi, Barry
Lamb, Brian Mitchell and Paul Tidwell.
His first hires were Mark Weber as an offensive line
coach and Jaime Hill as a defensive back coach in 2007. In 2010 he hired Nick
Howell. He followed that up in 2011 with the hire of Joe Dupaix, Ben Cahoon and
Kelly Poppinga. In a big shakeup, last season, 2013, he brought back Robert
Anae, hired Mark Atuaia, Jason Beck, Garett Tujague and Guy Holliday.
Just speculating, but in twenty years when a BYU
football player from Mendenhall’s era is inducted into the BYU HOF, do
you think they will be bragging about the great coaches they had while playing
at BYU? Me either.
The coaching pool for BYU football is very shallow by
the nature of the sponsoring institution, but of all of Mendenhall’s
hires (10) only 4 had any Division I experience before joining the BYU staff.
That would be Anae, at Texas Tech, UNLV, Hawaii; Mark Weber at UCLA, Fresno State,
Oregon State, Nevada; Joe Dupaix at Navy and Guy Holliday at UTEP and
Mississippi State.
Three have never coached anywhere but as grad
assistants at BYU. That would be Nick Howell, Kelly Poppinga and Mark Atuaia.
Two others other had never coached anywhere before joining the staff (Cahoon
and Doman).
Who knows if these guys will ever become great coaches
or even coaching legends, but with the loss of several key defensive starters
from last year and with Taysom Hill on hiatus, we are about to find out just
what kind of coaches Mendenhall has hired.
Coaching History
One of those guys with no college coaching history before becoming a
grad assistant for Mendenhall and then rising from assistant coach to defensive
coordinator is Nick Howell.
With the BYU defense now struggling to defend the pass, generate any
pass rush an
I don’t see that happening.
It’s hard to fire you own family. Bronco has personally tutored
Howell as a coach. He hand picked him to be his successor. It is almost like he
is his adopted son.
He won’t do anything to embarrass Howell. When Mendenhall
replaced Jaime Hill, he publicly removed him from the staff. Hill was paid, but
he wasn’t on the field.
Mendenhall won’t do anything public with Howell, if he does
anything at all. Howell will retain the title and still coach, but you can bet
Bronco will have much more input in the defensive meetings and call much more
of the defensive game.
If you are expecting a Manny Diaz scenario (the
When times are tough, you go back to doing what you do best. For Bronco
and BYU, it’s coordinating the Cougar defense.
Strength of Schedule for Cougars Just
Got Tougher
BYU just improved their strength of schedule the Hill and Hard way.
With Taysom Hill already having successful surgery on his broken leg
this past weekend, BYU’s schedule going forward without the premier
quarterback just got a lot tougher.
Forget the polls and playoffs. Those suddenly became non relevant. What
is relevant is that without Hill, what was judged to be a too soft schedule on
the national pundit scene is now a schedule that has gone from soft to suspect
on the BYU survival scene when considering games BYU can win the rest of this
season.
There are still two slam dunks left on the schedule regardless of who
is quarterbacking the Cougars; Christian Stewart or Christian Dior. Thank
goodness for
But when it comes to
It’s not time to abandon the good ship Lollipop yet, but I do
have my life vest on and tightly secured. I call the Cougars staying afloat for
this week in 24-21 upset of UCF.
TIMING IS EVERTHING
Taysom Hill’s broken leg couldn’t have come at a worse
time. Kyle Collinsworth’s return from a broken knee couldn’t have
come at a better time.
Throw in the fact that while BYU football was suffering from a little
humble pie in LaVell Edwards Stadium last Friday night, Dave Rose and his BYU
basketball was offering some real pie in the sky to get Cougar fans salivating
earlier in the morning on that same day.
Thank goodness for BYU’s Basketball Media Day. While the bottom
may appear to have fallen out in football, the aspirations and expectations for
BYU basketball appear to be through the roof.
The Cougars will begin official practices today. They may have to do it
with a regular practice, a swing shift practice and a graveyard practice. With
18 players on the roster, Rose may have to get creative in getting all of his
players meaningful practice time.
So why all the early hype?
It’s simple. Last season BYU couldn’t consistently shoot
the three, play defense or come up with a post presence on either side of the
ball.
The preseason promise is that the Cougars have or will fix all those
issues.
Players all promised that defense will be emphasized and executed this
coming season. Chase Fischer, the
The biggest buzz, however, was Dave Rose invoking the name of Hakeem
Olajuwon when describing new incoming freshman Corbin Kaufusi. To get your
blood pressure elevated watch
this video.
One thing Dave Rose didn’t talk about when it came to Kaufusi is
how he scored on the NBA Draft Combine tests. The Cougar coaching staff has
always put their players through the same tests in the preseason that the NBA
does for prospective players at their combine in
Kaufusi was off the charts according to the reports I got about his
performance. Maybe that is why the reference to Olajuwon. To get an idea of a
few of the things tested by the NBA and BYU, one of the tests is the Lane
agility drill (also known as the Box agility test). It measures how fast a player moves around the key, using forward
sprinting, side-to-side shuffling and backpedaling to navigate cones placed
around the key. NBA scouts say that they can determine who can be a good
defensive player based on this test.
Here are a couple of videos from a recent NBA scouting combine to give
you an idea of what BYU was testing and why the results that Kaufusi turned in
got BYU coaches breathing heavily.
Besides the Kaufusi excitement, Kyle Collinsworth is still the key to a
big season for Dave Rose and his Cougars. Actually the health of Collinsworth
is more important. Here is a video that should be interesting to watch. Collinsworth
TV Timetable
BYU vs.
Thursday, October 9 at
Kickoff: 5:30 pm MDT
TV: ESPN
BYU vs.
Saturday, October 18 at
Kickoff: TBD
TV: TBD
BYU vs.
Friday, October 24 at
Kickoff: 7:00 pm MDT
TV: ESPN or ESPN2
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