Gordon Monson: Kalani Sitake says BYU is ‘close’ to a Big 12 championship. Mistakes say not close enough.

Straight into the mix of BYU’s win over Houston on Saturday night, the Cougars took a punch thrown from a thousand miles away, in Ames, Iowa, where Iowa State beat Kansas State, eliminating BYU from the very thing the Cougars had targeted for so long this season — a spot in the Big 12 championship game. That opportunity passed them by via their own lapses and losses in recent weeks and in the knockout roundhouse from the Cyclones.

BYU’s sloppy 30-18 victory on its home field might have taken some of the pain off the landed haymaker, but … not all of it. How could it?

“Because we didn’t take care of business that way,” Kalani Sitake said, “we had to rely on the tie-breaker system. And so this is a great lesson for us to learn, that you can’t keep making mistakes and try to find ways out of it.”

But that’s exactly what his team did — goofed up and suffered from failures to find resolve, repair and relief.

You know the chronology: Nine straight wins, two consecutive defeats, one at home against Kansas, one at Arizona State, both of those losses littered with BYU errors, and then, even in their win over Houston, the Cougars fumbled and bumbled and stumbled around, turning the ball over, committing bobbles and blunders in a triumphant mess that suggested that, win or lose, qualification or no, they’re not quite authentic championship material.

If that sounds harsh, it’s because it is. But that’s nobody’s fault but the Cougars’. They’re the ones who, despite being predicted to finish in the bottom third of the Big 12, instead rose up into the top third. And through that surprising ascent, expectations soared alongside, to the point where the way they faltered over the last month, including their overall performance on Saturday night, can be classified as … disappointingly good.

“We’re close to being in the conference championship game,” Sitake said. “… We’re so close …”

Horseshoes-and-hand-grenades close.

The coach repeated and reiterated that the Cougars can’t fade away in the season’s final weeks and rely on other teams to bail them out. No, no, no, he said, “Find a way to win the games and do it outright.”

They finished the regular season with a 10-2 mark, 7-2 in league, and they’ll still be burdened with a reflective question that nobody likes to carry in their minds or on the backs: What might have been?

It might have been so much more.

Specific to Saturday night, a win emblematic of the earlier losses, Sitake said: “We made a ton of mistakes. … We can play better.”

He added: “We were not playing like our normal selves.”

But at regular season’s end, nobody’s quite sure what the Cougars’ normal selves are. Does anyone really know what’s normal and what isn’t?

“I got to get these guys back on track,” said Sitake.

Regardless, the Cougars went ahead and celebrated their Houston win — a win for winning’s sake — in a bittersweet kind of way. They hugged one another. They honored their seniors. They would have hoisted a toast to their achievements had that not brought an Honor Code investigation.

Fans and apologists might even suggest that a 10-win BYU team deserves consideration for a playoff invite, but that seems a reach too far for a team, in a bunched-up conference, that played much better in September and October than it did in November.

Even on the last night of November, against Houston, a Big 12 also-ran, the Cougars, as Sitake bemoaned, heaved and ho’ed, allowing the visitors, who featured one of the worst offenses in the country, to plow down the field — 80 yards in 10 plays — to score the game’s first touchdown near the end of the first quarter. Immediately thereafter, Houston attempted an onside kick that was scooped up by Talan Alfrey and returned 58 yards for a BYU score.

Houston went up, 10-7, and BYU countered with two touchdowns, scoring the second one with nine seconds remaining before the break. And while a 21-10 lead seemed somewhat satisfying for the Cougars, their rush of troubles opened holes in the bottom of their boat. Troubles such as a botched third-quarter drive to the Houston 3-yard line, which ended on a third-and-1 play that saw a high snap bobbled by quarterback Jake Retzlaff, and recovered by Houston. When Houston was forced to punt, that punt was muffed by BYU and recovered by Houston.

A subsequent 10-play drive by BYU, aided by Houston penalties, made it to within two yards of the goal line, but an odd sweep call took receiver Keelan Marion wide of the line of scrimmage, where he slipped, losing yardage and forcing BYU to kick a field goal.

Houston answered that with a scoring drive and a two-point conversion that cut the margin to 24-18 with 8:34 left in the fourth.

BYU answered that with a three-and-out.

Houston took possession at its own 37-yard line, seemingly in position to at least threaten to take the lead. But when QB Zeon Chriss suffered a strip sack that ricocheted the bouncing ball back to the 18-yard line, BYU recovered, and scored on a Retzlaff run with just under three minutes to play. Game over. The only excitement after that happened immediately following the score, when a skirmish broke out in the end zone, with Houston cornerback AJ Haulcy getting tossed, along with BYU receiver Darius Lassiter.

Exactly where that leaves BYU now is in a foggy holding pattern, waiting to discover to what bowl game the Cougars will be invited to play. Whichever one it is, it might come with a shiny trophy, but it will not include a shot at anybody’s championship. And in a season that for so long was all about title contention of one sort or another, in the Big 12 or, even grander, in the College Football Playoff, what comes next is sure to be a letdown.

“Something to aim for,” is what Sitake called it.

Such as it is.

And for that, the Cougars have nobody to congratulate or to blame but themselves.