U. will get a good jump, but Y. should finish fine

Utah has Pittsburgh behind it and UNLV is already road kill. Ahead are New Mexico, San Jose State, Iowa State, Wyoming and Colorado State.
With any luck — heck, with any competency — the Utes should go into their Oct. 30 game with Air Force with a 7-0 record.
It’s not that hard. Just pay attention and drive straight ahead.
The last part of the schedule is tough (AFA, TCU, Notre Dame, SDSU and BYU), but by then the Utes might think they’re bullet proof.
As for BYU, the football season isn’t as dead as many would believe. BYU is 1-1 after two games, but fact is, that’s where many believed the rebuilding Cougars would be after two games, anyway. It’s just that they beat Washington and lost to Air Force, instead of the other way around. The quarterback controversy isn’t that big a deal, yet. Switching QB’s succeeded in Game 1, and Bronco Mendenhall went away from it halfway through Game 2.
That doesn’t seem like a huge, irreparable mistake to me.
It seems like a coach who is figuring it out as it develops.
The platooning was unorthodox in Game 1, but it worked. And it only took half a game, last Saturday, to figure out they needed to change things. This week the Cougars are at Florida State — where they’ll likely lose — but after that come Nevada, Utah State and San Diego State — all winnable games, though Nevada looks to be tough. That would put the Cougars at 4-2, which is as good as any reasonable observer could have expected at this point of the season. Then after playing TCU — a loss, I’m guessing — BYU will beat Wyoming, UNLV, CSU and New Mexico in order. The Cougars would then be 8-3 going into the Utah game.
And by then BYU would have cemented a bowl berth.
Considering the losses from last year’s team, an 8-4 or 9-3 season would make for a nice little rebuilding season, if you ask me. After losing their quarterback, their best running back, their best defensive lineman and a number of other key players, you couldn’t have expected this year to be much better than the way I have it outlined.
This won’t be a great year for the Cougars, but it won’t be bad, either. Playing for bowl games isn’t the worst news on the planet.