A year after 4-9, BYU just beat Wisconsin at Camp Randall

The Cougars were terrible in 2017. Apparently not in 2018.

BYU has handed No. 6 Wisconsin its first loss in a regular season game since 2016. The Cougars won 24-21 on Saturday at Camp Randall Stadium. UW’s fate came down a 42-yard field goal try by Rafael Gaglianone with 41 seconds left, which he pushed wide left.

BYU coach Kalani Sitake called two timeouts in an attempt to freeze Gaglianone before the kick. Whether Sitake affected the senior kicker or not, the ball didn’t go through the uprights, and one of the biggest upsets of the season went official.

BYU was a 23-point underdog (or 23.5, depending on the sportsbook) against a team that sometimes wins ugly but pretty much always wins. The Cougars hadn’t beaten a top-10 team on the road since 1984, when it won an opener at No. 3 Pitt. That was the year LaVell Edwards’ team won the national title.

Squally Canada’s two touchdowns and 118 yards on 11 carries paced the BYU offense against one of the sport’s best defenses. Jonathan Taylor had 117 yards on 26 carries for the Badgers. Neither team accomplished much in the passing game.

This is a drastically better BYU team than the one we saw last year.

BYU’s 4-9 mark in 2017 was the school’s worst record in the modern era. The Cougars were boring and terrible, a weird lapse from years of being a (mostly) reliable bowl bet. They beat up on Arizona pretty well in Week 1, though, before losing by 3 to Cal in Week 2. They appear to have raised their quality of play a bunch from the horrible depths of last year.

It’s been a brutal Saturday for Big Ten teams all over.

Maybe Wisconsin’s difficulty as a 23-point favorite maybe shouldn’t have been as surprising as it was. Elsewhere, the MAC’s Temple crushed Maryland, the Sun Belt’s Troy beat Nebraska, and Kansas — which is Kansas — blew out Rutgers in college football’s biggest game of the century. Wisconsin’s defeat is a rotten cherry on top for the league.