BYU Football Countdown: Recapping players 78-88

No. 88 James Dye – Special Teams Specialist, Receiver – 1995-1996

Unless you are an avid fan from the mid 1990’s, you probably haven’t heard of James Dye. You have probably heard of his son Trey Dye who just graduated last season, but not James. James Dye was a receiver for the Cougars who had a few good moments but his fame came in the kick returns.

Kick returns, sort of like long snappers, punters, and even field goal holders often go unnoticed and get ignored unless they do something terribly wrong. A good kick returner though can cause a defense to consider kicking it short to force a fair catch, or even to kick the ball out of bounds. A good kick returner can make a fifty yard bomb kick into six points for his team.

Trey Dye did both. He had four lost fumbles, which is not good for a returner, however he also had five touchdowns. To my best knowledge and research, that is an all time best in the return game.

Rankings

Impact C+

As mentioned before a good kick returner can cause a kicking team to change their entire strategy. Looking at his stats it appears that most punters/kickers did whatever they could to prevent Dye from having big returns In one season he only had a combined 33 returns, which is extremely low for the main returner on a team. In some games, Dye doesn’t even have a return because kickers either kicked it out of bounds or kicked it high enough to force a fair catch. When he did the ball in hands though, he made a difference having returns average a BYU all time best of 19.8 yards per return. That means if a punter kicks the ball from the fifty to the ten yard line, on average if Dye gets to return it, the ball will be back at the 30 yard line, a net difference of 20 yards.

Statistics B

The four fumbles lost really hurt Dye from having a A- in this category, as well as his receiving stats, but his kick return numbers are really good! Dye holds the season record (21.8), career record (19.8), longest punt return (90), most return TD’s (5), and longest kickoff return (100). He had returns of 100, 90, 84 79, 75 and 67 which if you know anything about football is REALLY good. As far as work as a receiver he did have a few bright moments including big TD catches versus Texas A&M and Kansas State in the 1996 Holiday Bowl.

Memorable Moments C

Any of the above mentioned returns are memorable moments. The big catch in the Holiday Bowl is a great moment because that got BYU back into the game after trailing 15-5 in the 4th quarter. His 90 yard punt return touchdown against Wyoming in 1995 proved to be the difference in the game. Overall however, despite having huge returns and a few good memorable catches in big games, Dye did most of his work in blowout games (which at that time for BYU there were quite a few) which took a bit out of the memorable moments.