A Day of Mourning

This was one of the saddest games of my life. It looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. It looked to me like BYU thought that TCU was going to be handed to them like most of the other teams. What many may have forgotten (coaches included) is that THE RESOUNDING difference in TCU's football team is their SPEED! They are faster than almost any team I've ever seen. That is perhaps the ONE thing that I've ALWAYS wanted to see BYU do better at. It threw us off our timing. Our receivers were one step behind and the ball was often thrown a few steps behind. I think they missed some interceptions because they were TOO fast and overshot the ball. I know that there's a slight elevation difference, but that's not enough of an excuse.
We also looked like we were afraid. When we saw their tenacity, we didn't try to match it, but instead looked like we needed to play it a little more "safely". I hope Utah beats them and gets a surprise upset from someone else so when we beat Utah, we still win the Championship outright. THERE GOES THE NATION'S LONGEST WINNING STREAK!!! *sound of Charles crying*
The thing that is going to upset me the most is that USC lost and fell from like 3rd or 4th place to about 11th place. I don't remember for certain, but I think it was 10 spots or less and they lost to a freaking unranked team!!!!!!! You just watch, Sunday the polls will come out, and BYU, who lost to a ranked team, will fall MORE than 10 spots. I'd bet my soul on it. And to boot, BYU is in a conference (Mountain West Conference) that has dominated USC's conference (PAC-10) this year 6 out of 7 games!!!!! So who's in a harder conference? What should our loss mean? Not as much. We should be ranked about 11th after that loss, but I bet we'll be ranked in the low teens or 20's.
This makes me extra grateful for a Judgment Day when we will all be judged by a perfect Heavenly Father. Can you imagine being judged by a panel of referees or BCS pollsters? I think I'd give up trying to live a righteous life altogether.

A Decent Game

This game was also closer than I would have liked it to be, but I recognized that they were simply a better team than we had played yet. We just didn't play like I thought we would. But, in the end, we chalked it up to a bad day. We still only let them get 3 points. But you could just feel like we should have done better. This made us nervous about one of our biggest games of the year...TCU at TCU.

Blue&White Mormons vs. Blue&White Mormons

I haven't missed a game yet. I must admit that going to Logan isn't quite as exciting as going to Seattle. We didn't play super well, but I chalked it up to such a beating in the first quarter that we just got sloppy in attempt to not humiliate them like UCLA. We got some great pizza on the way up and we bought indian drinks for the way back. Very memorable game--probably the worst officiated game I've witnessed in my life.

Bludgeoning #2

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Don't ask me what happened to this team. They didn't show up either. It makes me wonder if BYU is pumping some sort of funky mist into the opponent's locker room before each game so they can't even put one lowsy point on the board. Wyoming isn't traditionally terrible, but wow. They didn't show. They did end up with the closest person this year to rush over 100 yards on our defense. I think he got something like 97. This game wasn't as fun as the last game. 44-0 is great, but it got a little boring because Wyoming just isn't a team I have much of a grudge against right now. Honestly, as I was trying to remember to blog about each game, I almost forgot this one altogether. It could have also been because I didn't sit next to a cute girl, but rather with my dad. Now, don't get me wrong, I LOVE to do anything with my dad, but I think he'd be OK with taking a back seat to a cute girl. He's understanding like that.

UCLA Bludgeoning

So, this game was interesting. I'm usually not terribly interested in utter beatdowns, but when it's a team like UCLA, I love every single stinking second of it. I think the thing that fascinated me the most was that the guy that gave the prayer asked that both teams would play to their level of preparation. I'm sure he meant it, too. So, why did we beat them 59-0? I don't know. The prayer would suggest that UCLA has never actually held a practice this season. And since I'm pretty sure that's not the case, it could also mean that BYU was just THAT much more prepared than UCLA. Was that the case? Well, perhaps it meant that this man's prayer was simply not answered the way he wanted it to be for any number of reasons. Whatever the reason, it was glorious. I also got to take a friend, Julie O'Neal, who is a new girl in the ward and she seems like quite a quality person. It was a good opportunity to get to know her better and I hope that she didn't think I was a complete freak by the end of the game. I tried hard to help her understand everything that was going on so she wouldn't be bored to tears. I think we figured out that the ROTC did around 307 pushups or something like that. And another highlight was finding a water spout by one of the vendors hanging from the ceiling so I didn't have to stand in those insufferably long lines at the drinking fountains.

VS.

It's about time I blogged again about BYU Football. This game was a joke in a way. We beat them severely in so many aspects of the game--in every way except the score. And how were we rewarded? We dropped in the poles. Oh well. It was FUN! Definitely a game worth driving all the way to Seattle for. It reminded me of the good ol' days going to Seattle with Doug Call to watch European exhibition soccer games. We had a fun group of people in two cars. We stayed with relatives of Trent Boulter. We ate good food, saw cool things, we were sworn at quite a bit and BYU brought one ROCKIN' band to the stadium for our tailgate party. I couldn't believe it. Washington had quite a tailgating crowd, bigger than BYU's home tailgating crowd, but BYU's AWAY tailgaiting crowd rocked my world. I wish we had gotten there earlier for food and what not. There were a few cool things in the stadium.

First, one of their players got knocked out cold and they brought the ambulance on to the field. The cool part there of course was that he wasn't paralyzed, but at one point we heard the crowd booing and we noticed on the other side of the stadium that a woman was being held back by security. We thought it was some freak trying to steal the show and then realized the crowd was booing because it was his mother who wanted to see him. We joined in the booing and then all cheered when they decided to let her go. It was tender. I cried. Most did, I think, or at least had GREAT respect for the graveness of the circumstance. The second coolest thing was that at half time the Washington band played the Cougar Fight Song! We went nuts! I thought that was great sportsmanship and heard that they've been trying to get the BYU band to do that at our home games for the other schools and they won't. Jerks. The third cool thing was at the beginning. We thought we were sitting in the BYU section because we were surrounded by what looked to be a couple thousand cougar fans and we were proud of the support around us and all down the sidelines as far as the eyes could see there were cougar fans. Then, when the team came out, the entire other endzone (a full sized endzone compared with our endzone which was just temporary bleachers) rose and cheered. We couldn't believe it. It was like a home game practically as far as our loudness went. I estimated over ten thousand BYU fans and later heard on the news that it was just past 11,000. Wow! The End since I'm tired of typing.