(Red) It's official... BYU is a loner...

Well today BYU made the 'leap of faith' as it has been called to go independent in football and join the WCC in other sports (minus a few others which sounds like they got screwed). My immediate reaction to the move was that in the short term I think it works pretty well, exposure and scheduling anyways. I would say that it is step up over the MWC for exposure, but how hard is that? All home games on ESPN is very good, but now they are at the will of ESPN. When ESPN says play a game they have to play. I'd be a little concerned about when the games may be played. Scheduling they do have Notre Dame on the docket as well as Texas. But they still have the WAC for about 6 games. That is a big step down over MWC competition. So they are going to be around 10 games already for the 2011 and 2012 seasons it looks like, but when the WAC tie in ends in the next few years things could get tricky. Now the thing I would be most worried about is that, say for example, BYU loses 2 out of their first 3 or 4 games. Normally those are reserved for non conference games and you could come back and win your conference. Now without a conference and losing those games you have no championship to look forward to, at that point BCS consideration is long gone. Motivation for a team can be shot. And the problem with independent scheduling I don't know if it will be easy to find a middle ground in strength of the schedule. You need to try and find a medium between what Navy does and what Notre Dame does. Because you could play yourself out of a season pretty quickly with a tough schedule that you made. At the same time you don't want to schedule a bunch of cream puffs and screw yourself out of a good ranking. The problem I could see is that you may not have to much of a say in which way that works itself out. Because you are playing to the availability of other teams and when they can play. Depending on how the cards fall you could be hating life. Overall I think it was an ok move. The MWC due to it's exposure didn't give BYU to much of a choice, but competitively I think staying in the MWC was a better solution. But I understand the move. After all I'm in the Pac 12 so life is all good at the U, uncertain days lie ahead for the Y.