The following is a partial transcript of BYU Head Coach Bronco Mendenhall's weekly press conference:
We’re glad that the bye week is over and anxious to play football again. I think our team is eager; I got that sense last week in practice. We had a great chance to allow some younger players to play in scrimmage and I think we had a chance to get healthier.
You’ve mentioned making incremental progress on offense. With the week off, have you improved more than that?
Probably on the same pace, but maybe just a hair more because we’ve had the chance to work on fundamentals so much. I don’t think you’ll see leaps and bounds or some gigantic difference from what you’ve seen.
You’ve talked in the past about using the bye week to assess coaches and your own tendencies. How much of that did you do this past week?
I think it’s been very productive and I think we have a lot clearer idea of what has worked. At some point in the season, it’s not that you give up on being the ideal offense, but you have to then acknowledge what you have been doing and what we’ve done well and what’s realistic. Again, not giving up on the kind of offense we’ve had in the past, but getting an idea of what we currently can do really well and then looking at bits and pieces of what’s really good to add to it.
UNLV is no longer bowl-eligible. Are they a dangerous team?
I think that rather the focus being so much on UNLV, there’s so much still to work on on our team. But they have some weapons and I know Bobby Hauck very well as their head coach. They’re as capable, especially offensively, as Wyoming who we’ve just played, if not more so. It’s year one for his program and every single chance they have to get better and play I think they’ll leverage and take advantage of. Nothing is coming to our team easy, currently, and I wouldn’t expect that to happen Saturday as well. We’re in for a tough game.