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PROVO — Six games into the season, the BYU football team is still plodding along making dumb mistakes that thwart opportunities for success.
Look no further than the last game, which they lost to Notre Dame, when the Cougars often were disorganized and couldn't execute the simplest of tasks. To put it mildly, there's no excuse to repeatedly fail to put the full complement of players on the field.
It can't be that hard to run out 11 players on the point-after-touchdown kick. Yet, that's exactly what occurred after BYU scored the game's first touchdown, forcing a 5-yard delay of game penalty on the extra point kick that was missed.
No wonder coach Kalani Sitake was visibly perturbed and highly frustrated during his postgame press conference. Those types of mistakes should have been corrected in practice weeks ago.
"It's Game 6 and we're struggling to put 11 guys out there," Sitake said. "A couple of times we had 10. Got to figure it out. That's all on coaching."
Yes, as much as the players share the blame, it does reflect poorly on the coaching staff. The time for accountability is long past due.
And it starts with the boss, who fully agrees.
"The sense of urgency needs to take place, and that's my job," Sitake said. "I've got to put more pressure on our guys to get it done. These stupid mistakes cannot happen, especially the mistakes that are happening with personnel and things like that. We're in midseason, we should be in better form as far as organized football and making sure we're getting calls in.
"We had to take some timeouts because we're not getting the call in right or didn't have enough people on the field or didn't have the right people in the field."
The errors can get overlooked against the likes of South Florida or Wyoming, two Group of Five teams BYU beat this season. But they are amplified against tougher competition the caliber of Notre Dame and hamper BYU's ability to gain national credibility.
East Carolina and Utah State won't do anything. Neither will Wyoming and Utah Tech.
Especially without the fallback of conference games, the measuring stick for BYU are the big names that occasionally dot the schedule. There's four of them this season, starting with Baylor and ending with Arkansas, and in between it was Oregon and Notre Dame.
From the BYU perspective, the point is Cougars blew a great opportunity to garner a healthy dose of positive publicity on a national scale. Again.
"The opportunity was there for us," said quarterback Jaren Hall. "We just let it slip through our fingers."
Even though the Irish are only 3-2, kicked out of any playoff competition after losing at home to Marshall in the second week, each of their games draws eyeballs across the country. There's a lot of Catholics out there.
This was BYU's golden dome chance, the kind of game the program needs to win. Beating all the Group of Five teams, which the Cougars do consistently, on the schedule won't cut it anymore.
Three weeks ago, coming off an impressive overtime win against then-No. 9 Baylor at LaVell Edwards Stadium, the Cougars ventured into the great Northwest to play Oregon. Two weeks removed from a 46-point shellacking against Georgia, the Ducks were ripe for the beating.
But BYU was barely competitive, putting up little resistance in a 21-point loss in a game that wasn't as close as the final score indicates. BYU's performance right from the start was downright embarrassing.
At least this time the Cougars showed some fight. A few key plays were the difference, leaving the losers agitated at another missed opportunity.
"We'll get through this," Sitake vowed.
