We made it through another painful offseason

Well ladies and gents, we made it through another way-too-eventful offseason. In the morning, week 0 kicks off in Ireland in what hopefully is statement win #1 of the season for the Big 12 in their collective non-conference slate.

I am beyond excited for ANY football to start up again and I am sure you all are as well. But even more than that, I am most excited to see what this BYU football team has been working on in the offseason to make the improvements they need to get over the hump and make an impact at the highest levels of this sport.

Before we get started, I am going to yet again remind you that if you are not in the CougConnect discord, there is SO much that you are missing out on! Come in and support the players with your contribution, participate in the Player Ask Me Anythings (AMAs), and hang out with other fun Cougar fans such as yourself.

2025 In Review

Glancing at the image above, we can remember exactly where we left off before all of the events of the offseason. Left off the ESPN graphic despite a top 10 Strength of Record and a Top-20 FPI with efficiencies in the top 20 of the sport to boot. We lost 2 brutal games to Texas Tech who had arguably the best defense in all of college football last year. Attribute that to an unhealthy Bear/LJ combo or bad luck or whatever you want. But I am here to tell you that the advanced stats beyond the box score tell a bit of a different story about this BYU team and hopefully will give people some confidence in where we can go from here.

BYU made it to their first of hopefully many Big 12 Championship games and I have to say, it feels so good to be back in a conference, and a P4 conference at that. BYU Freshman Phenom Air Bear reached rare air (okay I’ll stop) in his season’s performance that started at BYU in mid-June of 2025. I don’t know what you all expected of him, but I can honestly say I was blown away with his poise, dedication, toughness, and drive to lead BYU to a 12-2 season and a Pop Tarts Bowl win.

The Coug’s resume got them into the Top 12 of the final CFP Ranking and a Final AP Poll rank of #11. No matter how you look at it, given the circumstances of the offseason last year, I think we can all agree that we would have taken a 12-2 season at the beginning of last year without hesistation.

Despite all that, I know that I still have a bit of a bad taste in my mouth about finding BYU on the outside looking in of yet another 12 Team College Football Playoff appearance. So what went wrong? What can we identify as areas of improvement? We’ll start by getting a deeper look at the stats of last year. I will rehash quickly what goes into these stats and if you want more information about what they mean, look at the “How to read these stats” section at the bottom of the image below. All data here is opponent-adjusted using a ridge-regression model, excludes garbage time plays, and games against FCS opponents.

A couple of my favorite metrics that go into my belief of “who is playing well enough to compete for a national championship” include, but are not limited to Eckel Rate + Points Per Eckel, Pass Efficiency Differential (Margin), and Points Per Play. The most efficient teams in the country move the ball well on offense (Eckel Rate) and set themselves up to score (inverse for defense), have fantastic passing efficiency (Passer Rating) on both sides of the ball, don’t waste plays and drives by not walking away with points most of the time (Points Per Play).

So compared to 2024’s season end. Where did we end up at the end of 2025?

A Couple Notable Areas of Offensive Improvement

Points Per Eckel: 3.79 (#110 – 2024) -> 4.25 (#66 – 2025)

In 2024, BYU was one of the absolute best teams in the country at getting into scoring position while at the same time one of the worst teams at walking away with 6 or more points. This is the nicest way to say that the offense kept working their way inside their opponents’ 40 yard line and then relied on Will “Big Game Bill” Ferrin to put 3 points on the board for us. This stat jumped 0.46 points per quality drive and up 44 ranks for 2025. In my personal opinion, the floor of this stat for a true CFP team is 5 points per Eckel. Here is one area where BYU is making progress but still has a way to go before being considered Elite. While not there yet in this regard, the team is moving in the right direction!

3rd Down Success: 40.0% (#74 – 2024) -> 44.6% (#33 – 2025)

A-Rod is always going to treat many 3rd downs (especially with a bruiser combo of LJ and Bear) as 2 chances to get a 1st down. That is just how he operates. The difference between 2024 and 2025 is that in 2025 BYU stopped living on 4th down as much because of how good they were on 3rd down. BYU was approaching “coin-flip” status in regard to their 3rd down success. That is a tremendous way to keep your offense on the field and the ball out of your opponents’ hands.

Two Things We Absolutely Hate to See as an Offense

Starting Field Position: 31.9 (#8 – 2024) -> 29.3 (#49 – 2025)

While this is not necessarily a drop off in things that our offense did, it’s something we hate to see on offense. Falling 41 ranks and two and a half yards is a tough pill to swallow from a team that was top 8 in starting field position offensively in 2024. Some of this is special teams. Some of this is our defense not quite pinning people as deep as they had the year prior, but no matter how you slice it, the offense spent the year driving on longer fields than the year before on average.

Eckel Rate: 62.4% (#4 – 2024) -> 56.2% (#30 – 2025)

The other half of the equation in regard to Points Per Eckel. While BYU finished quality drives better, unfortunately they created fewer of them for themselves. While #4 to #30 is not a collapse per se, it is not what playoff-caliber teams do. As long as I have been keeping track of metrics, this stat – Eckel Rate, has proven to be one of the leading indicators of whether or not a team has what it takes to win the National Championship. No team in at least the past 5 seasons has had an Eckel Rate margin outside of the top 5 in the country and at least has had an offensive or defensive Eckel Rate in the top 5 in the country.

BYU has made some great strides and I think given the circumstances at the QB position going into the year last year, I am not sure BYU could find themselves in a better spot moving into this season.

Defensive Improvements

Late Downs: 41.1% (#58 – 2024) -> 35.4% (#20 – 2025)

BYU’s defense made tremendous strides in 2025 at getting off the field (caveat: after seemingly being asleep to start the game at times and allowing BYU to fall into holes where comebacks were needed). A defensive 3rd down success rate of 32.9% (#14 – 2025) down from 38.4% (#53 – 2024) and a 4th down success rate of 50.6% (#39 – 2025) down from 55.8% (#81 – 2024) led to a result TOP 20 defense at getting off the field on late downs. Our opponents still converted on over half of their 4th downs against us, but going from “can we please just get a stop” to “YES we stopped them” and a net Top 20 defense in this metric is a great direction to be moving.

Rush Success: 41.1% allowed (#73 – 2024) -> 37% allowed (#39 – 2025)

When teams ran at BYU in 2025, they knew they needed to find explosives, because on a play in and play out basis, BYU was a stout run defense. Making teams one dimensional seemed like a goal of this BYU squad and they made tremendous strides in being a team that could man up, be gap sound, and stop the run. That said, while there was tremendous improvement. There is still room to improve just as much in the coming year as they did this year if they want to find themselves contending for a Big 12 Championship and/or a CFP run.

A Tale of Two Sides of the Ball

Explosives – Great for the Offense, Great Pain for the Defense

One area where it seemed BYU was unable to get some consistency was in regards to explosive plays (rushes of 12+ yards and passes of 15+ yards) and explosive plays allowed. BYU’s offense had 120 explosive plays on offense (71 passes, 49 runs) good for an overall rank nationally of #9 in the country in 2025. Despite that, the GLARING weakness of this BYU defense was explosive plays allowed. BYU allowed 109 explosive plays (#115 in the country) with 72 passes allowed going for 15+ yards on the season. I don’t know if it was the increase in SOS, losing players to the pros or injury, or something else, but this BYU team allowed the 6th most explosive plays of any P4 team in the entire country last season. An absolute fall from grace.

What to fix in 2026

I love this roster. I love this schedule. I love BYU Football. But I cannot pretend that 2025 closed gaps that I wanted to see to elevate this BYU team from “lucky 11 win team” (as some people called BYU in 2024) to true CFP Contender. Many of these metrics that I have posted of BYU in the 20s and 30s or beyond are consistently Top 15-20 for Notre Dame caliber teams. If BYU is going to legitimately compete on the national stage this year, they will need to turn up the attention to detail to 11. I personally think we’ve got the dudes to do it! I hope they believe it too!

Above is the preseason snapshot of what will make or break this season for this BYU team. 2 preseason ranked opponents (reminder that preseason rankings don’t really mean anything, but they give the talking heads something to talk about. They have no actual impact or good track record of predicting where a team will finish the season ranked).

I want to be blunt. This schedule is not a death march on paper. Two games will likely decide whether or not this is a Playoff-Caliber team who made major strides in the offseason or if this is just another 10 or 11 win near miss on the outside looking in. Notre Dame rolls into Provo in mid-October for what I think is the game with the biggest stakes BYU has played at LES in the 21st century. Followed by a potential rematch with Texas Tech in the Big 12 Championship should BYU do what we know they are capable of and put 11+ wins in the win column.

To the offense. With Bear in his Sophomore campaign, get back above 60% quality drives and find paydirt. Keep ahead of the sticks. To the unproven and unknown WRs. It’s time to prove it to yourself and Cougar nation. You’ve been working and grinding for this. We cannot wait to see what you’ve got.

To the defense. You have the potential to make or break the season. “Defense Travels” and “Defense wins championships” are common phrases that time and time again are proven to be a major factor in the overall success of programs. Keep the explosives down. We have a slept-on top caliber DB room with some absolute dudes in the front 7.

You can find me on X/Twitter @m4gbit and hanging out in the CougConnect discord. Subscribe to CougConnect if you haven’t already! And most important of all. Go Cougs! This is the kind of season we’ve been hoping for!