Utah Tech

I'll just throw this out there here because I wanted to say it. I have deep respect for the Peterson family. Paul Peterson coaches a good program with a high scoring offense, and is part of an interesting family. His brother Ben Peterson, was founder of one of the very successful Utah county SaaS stories at BambooHR. They did *very* well. I worked there for a little over 2 years, along with another brother Jake in their marketing and analytics department. I think there are about 10 brothers and sisters in the Peterson family. It was a career moment for me doing analytics for this HR software company, before during and through much of the pandemic.



At the time of writing this, Utah Tech is up 6-0. I wouldn't mind in the least if Coach Peterson found his way eventually to Provo. I think he runs a quality program and is one of those FCS programs that I respect. The whole family is legit and high caliber. I usually don't share this kind of opinion, but in the Cougar Corner family am thinking this is ok.

I don't know anything about the coach, so I can't really be happy for his sake. And I'm definitely not happy with how BYU's defense is playing right now. This has to be the worst defense I've seen all year, against a team that isn't officially even FCS yet.

Not even FCS yet is correct.



Take a suspect D against a high energy spread D3 offense and here we are at the half 28-20.



Keanu Hill is one of those receivers that is reliable and central to the read-through for Jaren. Nice going young man, having 3 touchdowns in one half is pretty good.

Up 22 in the 4th and Hall still trotted out with the offense. Blaine and Dave were as flabbergasted as I was. And in on that series a QB draw was called with QB1. Ok, the defense played bad and kept the game much closer than it was. Since we're afraid of losing to Stanford I guess bowl eligibility was on the line. Hall threw for 450 yards. Cool, we haven't seen those type of numbers for a while. But why on earth wasn't Conover put in earlier? Is he really that bad? Even if Hall leaves I wouldn't be surprised to see Conover transfer. When Hall's shoulder was less than 50% QB2 should have been playing. So yeah this is my takeaway from the game. Conover should have gotten to play two full quarters.

Reportedly the reason the defense was so keyed in on what BYU was doing is because some Utah Tech coaches with BYU backgrounds were reading the plays being signaled in and telling the defense what was coming. Notice late in the 2nd quarter and all during the 2nd half Jaren was going to the sideline and Fesi was relaying the play call directly rather than use the signals. Then their defense didn't look nearly as good.

Fido wrote:

Reportedly the reason the defense was so keyed in on what BYU was doing is because some Utah Tech coaches with BYU backgrounds were reading the plays being signaled in and telling the defense what was coming. Notice late in the 2nd quarter and all during the 2nd half Jaren was going to the sideline and Fesi was relaying the play call directly rather than use the signals. Then their defense didn't look nearly as good.

Wait, don't those signals change from season to season and game to game? Although signal stealing isn't unheard of (supposedly 90% of schools do it) it was only a problem this season against Utah Tech? They're barely an FCS team. We should have been able to tell them our play and out-execute them, right? And the offense wasn't really the problem. What's the excuse for the BYU defense?

Just wanted to say that I feel bad for Katoa. Senior night, he fumbles it on his first carry and then is benched the rest of the game. Ouch

Some good and some bad in this game to review, but one moment has me flabbergasted; near the end of the game, we are up comfortably and the call is for Hall on a QB draw?!?!? Inexcusable play call.