The tone has shifted in the last 72 hours, and it feels deliberate.
Kalani Sitake, a head coach known for stepping in and taking every bullet for his players, isn’t doing it anymore. It’s subtle at times, but he is starting to publicly criticize an experienced roster that shouldn’t be 4-4 at this point in the season.
“It’s not about the plays or the calls, it’s about executing better,” Sitake said on Monday.
Some of that falls on the coaches, Sitake said in the wake of a 41-14 loss to Liberty. But for the first time this season, he has begun to indicate that it is no longer just a coaching issue.
“I’d be concerned if we didn’t have any bodies out there to make tackles, but we had guys out there to make plays,” he said.
Translation: the scheme worked but the players didn’t make the plays.
In many instances, it wouldn’t be a big deal to say what Sitake said. Coaches need to hold players accountable, too. But for a coaching staff that always seems to say the right thing, this feels like a significant shift. Until this loss, Sitake took responsibility at every turn this season as his team fell deeper and deeper into this shocking slide.
But something has started to give, and Sitake gave a glimpse into what that was on Monday.
He talked about how he took the playcalling duties away from his defensive coordinator last week and boiled the scheme down to the nuts and bolts.
It was a change firstly aimed at improving the effectiveness of the defense. But secondly, Sitake wanted to see what the problem was on defense. Was it coaching, the scheme, or the players?
“To me, [we wanted] to see where we need to add certain players and where we need to make corrections,” Sitake said. “A lot of it is sometimes personnel and sometimes it is coaching. We got to get more out of our guys and see where they can deliver.”
And since that Saturday game, he has been more critical of the players. It feels like a coach who has changed the scheme, changed the personnel, but now has only one culprit left.
It is a staff-wide trend, too. Special teams coordinator and associate head coach Ed Lamb put more blame on his roster.
“There are a lot of players listening to outside voices,” he said on BYUtv in a starkly candid critique.
Offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick said matter of factly, “This game was not about scheme, I want to make that clear.” Roderick focused instead on issues of confidence.
People can debate the strategy of calling out players publicly. I’m not going to do that right now. But it is a trend we need to monitor at this point, especially as the program figures out how to navigate the worst stretch it has seen in years. How will this play out over the next four games of the season?
Is there a fundamental problem with the defense?
There were two thoughts that stuck out to me about BYU’s defensive performance on Saturday. None of them had to do with a single play in a 547-yard day from Liberty, it was more overarching.
The first thought was about what Liberty head coach Hugh Freeze said earlier in the week about BYU. He said BYU was bigger, more talented, everything you would expect from a college football program at a later stage of development. Didn’t mean BYU couldn’t lose, but it meant BYU had a higher caliber of athlete.
But then my second thought after the game was about how slow BYU’s defense looked. They looked like the unit with inferior athletes as Liberty’s speed and physicality pushed BYU around. Defensive linemen were knocked 6 yards off the line of scrimmage. Linebackers, too.
And frankly, that was the most concerning part of it all. Liberty, with theoretically worse athletes, out-athleted BYU.
Now, imagine what that would look like in the Big 12? Or forget the future, what is that going to look like for the rest of the season?
We can talk about the numbers all we want. They are awful. BYU is ranked 117th in run defense, 127th in first downs allowed, 103rd in total defense. On third down, the unit is ranked 128th out of 131 teams.
But if Liberty is more athletic, I don’t know what changes will fix this group the rest of the way.
The center situation continues
The offense wasn’t good this week, 14 points against Liberty speaks for itself. But a confusing storyline has emerged on the offensive line.
Connor Pay, the team’s starting center for the first half the season, sat again against Liberty. He didn’t start against Arkansas, either.
Sitake says he is not hurt, but is losing a battle to current starter Joe Tukuafu. It is a little hard to believe.
Tukuafu was the lowest-graded player on the offense this week according to Pro Football Focus. He also recorded a penalty — a rare false start as a center.
Plus, Pay was playing quite well. He was the best center in the nation for pass blocking, according to PFF. He also was seen as the natural successor to James Empey, BYU’s four-year starter who graduated last year.
This week Tukuafu is again listed as the starter.
