Please Don't Punt!

I had never seen a punt team essentially lose a college football game until I watched the BYU-TCU game last week.  It's never good when your punt team is on the field because it means your offensive drive was stopped, but when BYU's 4th Down team took the field it was a flat-out disaster.  Case in point...BYU performed 4 punt snaps against TCU:

Punt #1 - Bad snap, -34 yards, led to TCU TD after 2 plays
Punt #2 - Partial block, 23 yards, led to TD after 3 plays
Punt #3 - Bad punt, 16 yards, led to TD after 2 plays
Punt #4 - Fumbled snap, -15 yards, led to TD after 4 plays

The BYU defense was tough against the Horned Frogs, but BYU learned that
all parts of the team need to be playing at a high level if they are going to beat
a good team like TCU...including the punt team.

So yet again, BYU found a way to lose a "Big Game".  They lost the turnover battle yet again (3-0), but the punt team was the real issue behind the loss and each of the 4 bad punt plays above don't count as official turnovers.  The BYU offense outgained TCU and moved the ball throughout the game, the BYU defense held TCU to its lowest offensive output of the year.

BYU (6-3) has a bye week to think about the Disaster in Dallas, then they will have 3 very winnable "WAC" games against vs. Idaho (1-7), vs. New Mexico State (3-5) and @ Hawaii (5-3) to end the regular season.  If BYU continues to play the way they did against TCU and in seemingly every other "Big Game" in recent years, the WAC might be the best place for BYU to end up unless they want to end up 2-7 in any BCS conference.