Deep in the odds out of Vegas, the ones that have BYU’s Kalani Sitake listed as the sixth-most likely college head football coach to be fired first this coming season, is good news and bad.
The bad is that BYU football is lousy right now and only sweet-faced, lollypop-sucking optimists expect it to be anything better in the months ahead. That’s right, the Cougars finished with a 2-7 record in the Big 12 last season, 5-7 overall. And perhaps the worst part of that sub-mediocrity is that BYU lost its last five games in 2023, and six of its final seven.
Those sweet-faced lollypop-suckers would point out rather haplessly that the Cougars played Texas fairly tough on the road for a while at least before falling to the Longhorns, 35-6.
And with a few favorable what-ifs, BYU might have defeated Oklahoma, despite losing to the Sooners at LaVell’s Place, 31-24, giving up three critical turnovers, including one biggie near the end. Oh, baby, remember that? Jake Retzlaff does. Again, the optimists will say the Cougars outgained the Sooners in that game and it was close throughout. The scoreboard will say the last numbers there are the only ones that mattered.
And then, there was the double-overtime loss at Oklahoma State at season’s end, a loss that looked like a victory over the first two quarters, with BYU going up, 24-6. Unfortunately, the back half was accompanied by OT, all of which combined for one more defeat.
The Cougars tried real hard — and you can take that as a compliment or as an insult, whichever you please. Either way, if observers had five bucks for every postgame comment by Sitake that included, “I’m proud of my guys,” and “We made too many mistakes,” they’d have a duffel bag full of green to make a few more bets in Vegas.
The good news — well, sort of — part of the equation here is that if Sitake is listed as a favorite to get canned first in all of college football, it means somebody at BYU is thought to be serious enough about winning that losing will not be tolerated. It’s a proud football program facing a regular-season challenge a step above what the Cougars faced back in their glory days. BYU will have to improve, not by a little, but by a lot, and that’s the problem for Sitake and his coaching staff and his players.
They cannot — unless something really weird happens and happens consistently — be better than they are. And that means more losses are on the horizon. How many? Who knows, but oddsmakers — guys who usually are fairly smart on such matters — believe there might be enough of them for Sitake to be let go. That would be a drastic move, but I’m not laying the odds here, the Vegas dudes are.
At some point, Sitake, recruiting advantages either with him or without him, will have to prove that he can put a product on the field, can coach up a product, that will not only beat a slate of substandard teams, but above-average ones. Not just here and there, but on the reg. Not in a sporadic emotional burst, but as a matter of equal or superior talent. What the odds are on that happening in a Big 12 that is getting bigger all the time beats me. And there’s a decent chance they’ll beat Kalani Sitake, too.
So it is that the heat is on a really smart, competent, nice man running the show in Provo. We’ll see if he’s smart and competent and nice enough to cool his own seat. Kalani knows full well that if the heat weren’t on him, under him, and around him, BYU football wouldn’t be as proud as previously thought.
FYI: No. 1 on the list of first coach to be fired is Florida’s Billy Napier at 4/1. Second is Arkansas coach Sam Pittman (5/1), followed by Mario Cristobal at Miami (6/1). Baylor’s Dave Aranda is next at 7/1. Clark Lea at Vanderbilt is listed at 8/1. And then … yeah, Sitake at 10/1.
Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.