BYU's grid schedule has a vacancy to fill

It remains to be seen how BYU will use the spot in its 2008 football schedule recently vacated by the University of Nevada.

One thing we do know is the Cougars already have two games with BCS opponents scheduled for 2008 — UCLA and Washington. Athletic director Tom Holmoe is on record saying his first priority for replacing Nevada would be a similar opponent — not another BCS team, but rather what we used to call a Division I-AA team, like Eastern Washington in 2007.

Still, he'll have to make a decision sooner than later to post the non-league Cougar slate for the Mountain West's master league schedule, and that may mean going with a team like Eastern Washington if the Western Athletic Conference doesn't come up with a comparable foe.

BYU wants to keep a similar feel to the early schedule, fitting it in a home game and doing it early, before league play begins.

But that's a debate for another day.

The model Holmoe and head coach Bronco Mendenhall are trying to use fits the same scheduling philosophy used in the LaVell Edwards era. Play a couple of the big boys, take on the challenges of the league schedule and then fit in what one would consider some winnable fodder.

There is a tendency by some to inflate the difficulty of BYU's strength of schedule back in the glory days, when the Cougars won 10 consecutive WAC titles from 1976 to 1985 — or the eras from Gifford Nielsen through Robbie Bosco.

Trouble is, back in the day, some of the league games BYU played in the WAC were akin to playing Northern Arizona or Eastern Washington today.

Take a BYU league opponent like Texas-El Paso, for instance. Back in that year, the UTEP Miners were horrible. From 1977 through 1985, the most games the Miners ever won in a season were two. In 1980, when Jim McMahon and Company throttled UTEP by an obscene score of 83-7, the Miners finished 1-11, with one win, just like in 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981.

BYU players from that era routinely say they barely had to get up for playing some games.

BYU's chief rival, Utah, was not on the solid ground built by Ron McBride and elevated by Urban Meyer and Kyle Whittingham, who just finished 9-4. In those days, Utah never had a nine-game win season. The best was in 1978, 1981 and 1985 — all with eight wins.

In BYU's WAC run, there were plenty of five-win Utah teams on the league schedule. Colorado State and New Mexico may have been worse.