"I've got a little riddle for you: how do you kill a god?"
Hades' reverberating inquiry has haunted my mental space for the past two weeks. BYU football, with a bye week's buffer, stares down their most foreboding task of the season: toppling the 8th-ranked Texas Tech Red Raiders in Lubbock. Tech remains the favorite to claim the Big 12 championship at the end of the season, and has been the apparent ruling force in the league, despite the BYU Cougars remaining the only unbeaten team among the bunch.
Yet in spite of this, Tech approach home field and a top 10 matchup with a double-digit favorite tag stuck to their helmets. Nobody believes that the lowly BYU could enter this house of horrors and escape with their dignity. To their point, nobody has won in Lubbock this season besides the hometown champions themselves, nor has any previous team really even made the Red Raiders break a sweat.
Related: Memoirs from the Mount: BYU football is on a mission to right the wrongs of seasons past
Texas Tech has yet to allow more than 17 points on their home soil all season, while averaging 43.0 points at home against the Big 12. Their most recent home game? A 42-0 blanking of Oklahoma State. Sure, that's Oklahoma State, and this is BYU, but let's be entirely honest here: that's not an encouraging history lesson for the boys in blue.
But the answer to Hades' instigating riddle may be even more disheartening: "you can't [kill a god], they're immortal."
The best thing about problems, however, is that no problem can exist without a solution. If the Texas Tech Red Raiders seem immortal, all you have to do is bring them back down to Earth. You have to turn them mortal, and one team has already done that this season.
Take a look at Tech's 8-1 record. What do you notice? Sure, that's an impressive sum in the win column -- matching the Cougars' eight wins -- but this is no resume without blemish. That '1' in the loss column is evidence of a fact that has yet to be verified for the BYU Cougars: this team is beatable. Arizona State proved that on October 18th.
The Sun Devils haven't been the world-beaters they were projected to be during the preseason. They hold losses to Mississippi State, Utah, and Houston, and have just an outsider's chance of playing for the Big 12 championship game in Arlington, but they've done the one thing that no other team could by taking down Texas Tech in Tempe 26-22.
They got it done through defense and the passing game. Sam Leavitt threw for 319 yards against the stout Red Raiders' resistance, which proved necessary considering the run game managed just 75 yards. On the other end, the Sun Devil defense controlled Tech through the first three quarters, allowing just seven points before the fourth quarter.
15 of Tech's 27 rushing attempts in that game arrived via quarterback Will Hammond's legs (the backup who dominated the Utes, but is now out for the season with an ACL tear), and the Sun Devils slowed down the passing game to a crawl, allowing only 167 yards.
So what's the verdict? Is this replicable? In Lubbock, I'm not sure. The Sun Devils dominated in every facet of the game, but a late Red Raider comeback effort put the result in jeopardy. BYU hasn't been known for stifling their opponents at all this season. To the contrary, most of their wins this year have arrived off the back of a come-from-behind plot or a narrow escape as time expired.
But if BYU wants to win this game, they'll likely have to control the box score, control possession, and control the narrative. Tech is not a team that the Cougars can afford a slow start against -- they're better than Iowa State, and they're miles better than Arizona.
But they're not untouchable. They're not invincible. They're not gods. BYU has the roadmap to victory, but the path remains treacherous.