The BYU football team is ranked No. 17 in the latest Associated Press Top 25 poll released Sunday, but many around the country are now talking as though the Cougars should have higher aspirations than that.
BYU is being considered by many as a candidate to make the 12-team College Football Playoff, while at least one prominent writer considers the Cougars to be one of the 10 best teams in the nation.
Here’s a sampling of what college football analysts around the country are predicting about BYU after it beat the Baylor Bears on Saturday to move its record to 5-0 on the season.
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With the College Football Playoff expanding from four teams to 12 this season, the five highest-ranked conference champions and then the next seven highest-ranked teams will earn berths.
Right now, BYU is the only team in the Big 12 Conference that is both 2-0 in conference play and undefeated overall (Colorado and Texas Tech are also 2-0 in Big 12 action but have lost a game, while Iowa State is undefeated at 4-0 but has only played one conference contest).
As such, many people have put the Cougars in their CFP projections as the default Big 12 champion, although a number of people have put them in their projected fields while predicting that another team will win the Big 12.
Bleacher Report’s Andrew Peters, for example, has BYU getting one of the seven at-large spots (the No. 11 seed) with Utah winning the Big 12.
Four of a 13-member ESPN panel, meanwhile, have the Cougars winning the Big 12 title and getting the No. 4 seed in the CFP in their latest CFP projections (one still predicts Utah will win the Big 12 despite its loss to Arizona on Saturday, while one has both teams in the CFP — BYU winning the Big 12 and Utah getting an at-large bid).
ESPN’s Kyle Bonagura, meanwhile, has the Cougars winning the Big 12 and getting the No. 4 seed in the CFP in the latest weekly bowl projections he publishes with colleague Mark Schlabach.
Schlabach has Kansas State winning the Big 12 and BYU and Utah going to the Texas Bowl and Alamo Bowl, respectively, while Bonagura has Utah going to the Sun Bowl.
Three AP poll voters — Michael Lev, Chris Murray and David Briggs — slotted BYU as being a top 10 team in the country this week, but perhaps no one is more bullish on the Cougars than Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger, who put them all the way up at No. 6 in his weekly top 10 rankings.
“Some within the industry thought coach Kalani Sitake — in his ninth season — needed a strong year to cool his seat after going 5-7 in Year 1 in the Big 12 in 2023. Here the Cougars are, (five) games into the season, and without a loss,” Dellenger wrote.
“They led 21-0 against the Bears before hanging on for the win. Couple that with victories at SMU and against Kansas State and the Cougars have a pretty strong resume thus far.”
