Brace yourself, BYU fans. The Cougars are doomed.
Kirk Herbstreit has given them the kiss of death. The ESPN football "expert" (and I use that term loosely) not only voted BYU No. 5 in this week's AP poll, but he talked about the possibility they could end up playing in the national championship game.
Doomed, I tell you.
Herbstreit, of course, picked Oklahoma to beat BYU "big" on "College GameDay."
Not that I blame him. I thought the same thing.
But of the eight games Herbstreit picked on "GameDay," he got two right. Two. You'd do better flipping a coin.
Fellow ESPN "expert" Lee Corso went 3-6. (Herbstreit didn't make a pick on the Alabama-Virginia Tech because he worked that game later on Saturday.) Embarrassingly, guest "expert" Chipper Jones (of the Atlanta Braves) beat them both by going 4-5.
And now Herbstreit, who has so often denigrated the Cougars, has jumped on the BYU bandwagon.
They're doomed. Doomed.
WHO WOULD'VE THOUGHT? It's possible that Coleby Clawson has become the most-seen-in-clips Cougar in BYU football history.
Yeah, I know he has yet to achieve the fame of, say, Jim McMahon, Steve Young or Ty Detmer. But when those guys were playing college football, there weren't 24-hour news and sports networks.
And, at last count, the clip of Clawson tackling Sooner QB Sam Bradford has aired, oh, about a billion times.
MTN. SLIDE: In the aftermath of the Utah-Utah State game last week, I was, predictably, inundated with e-mails complaining about the quality of the broadcast.
No. 1 on the list remains the lack of an HD signal. And, yes, that stinks. Absolutely. As I've written here before, we're going to have to put up with it for now. There are no HD games until November.
No. 2 on the list was the broadcast team of James Bates and Todd Christensen. And, again, I have to agree. They've gone from bad to worse.
And even if we allow for the growing pains of technology, sometimes it seems like The mtn. is just serving up softballs for its critics to hit over the fence.
Did you see that incredibly lame promo with Bates and Christensen on the back of a scooter? Geez, wouldn't it have been easier just to run a graphic declaring, "We're bush league and we stink"?
But the extended, fawning phone interview Bates and Christensen conducted with Florida Coach Urban Meyer was beyond bad and downright aggravating. They completely ignored four consecutive plays on the field, barely mentioned a fifth, then ignored another while they licked Meyer's boots. After Meyer got off the phone, Bates and Christensen ignored two more plays while they continued to gush about him.
Listening to Bates talk about what a "very special kid" Florida QB "Timmy Tebo" is was gag-inducing.
Gee, I thought this was supposed to be about the Mountain West Conference, not the SEC.
As long as these guys are in the booth, it will be impossible to take The mtn. seriously.
NOT IN HD: If you're looking forward to watching the Utes take on San Jose State on Saturday on ESPNU, and you're excited about seeing the game in HD, calm down.
ESPNU isn't in HD.
And for those of you who are certain everything would have been great if the Mountain West had signed a less-lucrative contract with ESPN — that pact called for a lot of MWC games to be on ESPNU.
No one has been more critical of The mtn. for its obvious failings than I have. But nothing is as black and white as irate fans want to make it.
DAVIE FUMBLES: It's not like everybody on ESPN is so much better than the guys on The mtn. After all, ESPN is saddled with the unfailingly incompetent Bob Davie.
In the midst of ESPN2's coverage of the LSU-Washington game, Davie referenced the controversial unsportsmanlike conduct assessed against UW QB Jake Locker in last year's BYU-Washington game.
"They had BYU beat here early in the season," before that call, Davie declared.
That is, of course, baloney. That penalty came with two seconds to play. At most, it cost UW a chance to tie. (If we accept the penalty helped BYU block a PAT, preserving BYU's' 28-27 win.) By no stretch of the imagination did Washington have BYU "beat."
So Davie was flat-out wrong. As usual.
e-mail: pierce@desnews.com