BYU football: Cougars fall flat as Florida State rolls

PROVO — There was a team Saturday at LaVell Edwards Stadium that looked like it belongs in the nation's top 10 and deserves a Bowl Championship Series berth.

It certainly wasn't BYU.

For the Cougars, it will be remembered as a squandered opportunity. For Florida State, it was just like old times as the Seminoles revived their storied tradition in a dominating fashion. Seventh-ranked BYU, and its 18-game home winning streak, were tomahawk-chopped by unranked FSU, 54-28.

"The way we came out and played today was tough. It's actually embarrassing," said defensive lineman Jan Jorgensen.

"This is a frustrating loss for our football program," said BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall. "(FSU) played longer and harder than we did. Our weaknesses were exposed and that gives us a lot to work on."

Florida State did to BYU what many thought Oklahoma would do to the Cougars two weeks ago in Arlington, Tex. BYU, which climbed in the polls after its stunning victory over the Sooners, will tumble in the rankings when they are released today. This drubbing ends the talk about the Cougars possibly playing for a national championship.

"Everybody talked about it, everybody was saying, 'Hey, if they go undefeated why not give them a chance,'" said quarterback Max Hall. "This is tough. We knew we had a special chance to do something. We knew this Florida State game would be a big game. But you lose football games sometimes. That's just how it goes ... In the end, they were just a better football team tonight than we were."

Florida State's 79-year-old coach, Bobby Bowden, has coached in plenty of big games in his distinguished 50-year coaching career and it showed Saturday.

"(The Cougars) were sitting on top of the world, they were in the top 10 and we were not even ranked," Bowden said. "And I thought we had a chance at slipping up on them. I felt like we had a tremendous chance to catch them today not ready."

FSU's offense, led by junior quarterback Christian Ponder, wore down BYU's defense while the Cougar offense made too many mistakes against an opportunistic Seminole 'D.'

FSU rolled up 512 yards of total offense, including 313 on the ground. Ponder passed for 195 yards and ran for 77 more. His performance was reminiscent of that of Utah's Brett Ratliff, who was, prior to Ponder, the last quarterback to engineer an opposing victory at Edwards Stadium, back in 2005.

"If I were to say there was one difference from our previous two games to today, it was the quarterback's ability to run the ball. That was a big difference in the game," Mendenhall said. "We may have underestimated maybe what (Ponder) was capable of."

The Seminoles converted 12 of 15 third-down opportunities and controlled the ball for nearly 40 minutes.