Many years ago, I covered an Orem High football playoff loss, by a significant margin. I couldn’t locate Tigers coach Paul Clark on the field after the game but finally tracked him down in the catacombs below the school. I asked him what went wrong.

His reply was perfect: “It was a total breakdown, all the way from the head coach to the water boy.”

I reflected on that statement while watching the final moments of BYU’s pre-Halloween horror show of a loss at Liberty on Saturday. After taking a 14-3 lead after one quarter, the Cougars were outscored 38-0 the rest of the way in a 41-14 thrashing.

BYU coaches like to talk about playing “complementary football,” where each phase of the team contributes to help the other succeed. That certainly hasn’t happened much in 2021 and definitely not in the past three games.

Saturday’s loss was a complete and utter breakdown from head coach Kalani Sitake to the water boy.

The defense has taken a lot of heat lately for its play and Liberty rolled up 547 yards and 28 first downs against the Cougars. The special teams problems, especially with field goals, are well documented. Those factors have led the offense to press, feeling as if it has to score every time it has the ball.

It’s a vicious, never-ending cycle.

The results are what you saw on Saturday.

Like just about every opponent BYU has played this season after a dominating opening win against South Florida, Liberty — which managed to beat FCS Gardner-Webb by all of one point last week — seemed to have the perfect game plan against the Cougars and despite a couple of turnovers rolled to an easy victory.

Here’s a couple of mind-numbing numbers: Against Notre Dame, Arkansas and Liberty, the BYU defense faced 32 possessions and forced exactly four punts. The Cougars allowed 20 scores (15 touchdowns, five field goals) in those 32 possessions.

As @hooray_4_you posted on Twitter, “Right now, the #byufootballD is about as effective as a ‘please take one’ sign on Halloween candy.”

The offense has mostly escaped the wrath of BYU fans up until now, but the Cougars were awful on that side of the ball on Saturday as well. Quarterback Jaren Hall might have had his worst outing of his career with 18 incompletions (16 of 34, 187 yards, 2 TD’s), forcing passes and missing open receivers. He’s not right physically and trying to gut it out. Maybe it’s time to shut him down and get your supposed quarterback of the future, Jacob Conover, into the game for some much needed experience.

Liberty, now 7-1, is a good football team that pushed then-No. 19 Wake Forest to the limit before losing 37-36 early in the season. Anyone expecting BYU to roll into Lynchburg and manhandle the Flames haven’t been paying attention.

The biggest issue is that the Cougars are getting beaten soundly and not competing.

I don’t think there can be any argument that BYU is at its lowest point under Sitake since starting the 2017 season 1-7, finishing 4-9. Since then, Sitake had the Cougars on the rise, culminating with an 11-1 mark in 2020 and 10-3 last season.

Right now, the BYU football team is broken physically, emotionally and mentally. There’s a huge amount of work to do this week for the players and coaches to try and get things right before Friday’s game against East Carolina.

BYU fans are wondering, and rightly so, if Sitake and this coaching staff are the right guys to take this program into the Big 12 next season, especially if they can’t find a way to get the Cougars to respond in the final four weeks of the season and make a bowl game.

This slide has been going on for weeks now, and it doesn’t look promising. None of the changes that took place over the past week made a bit of difference, and that’s disturbing. In fact, the Cougars look worse, not better.

The blame for this one is on everyone in the program, from the head coach to … well, you know the rest.

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