Provo on a Friday night in October. There are worse places in college football, and I'd argue not many better ones when the crowd is loud and a ranked team has something to protect. No. 8 BYU came home and handled Iowa State, and if you want the play-by-play and the photos, the Deseret News had it covered live.

What struck me about this one was the shape of it. Ranked teams coming home after a road stretch are where upsets go to hatch, and Iowa State has done enough sneaky things to good teams over the years that nobody in that stadium was exhaling in the first quarter. BYU didn't give the Cyclones a door to walk through. A team that understands its situation does that.

And let me tell you, the Cougars' situation is real. A top-ten ranking in mid-October means the committee is watching, means every fourth down gets second-guessed, means the margin for a slip is thin. You go back through the years, and the teams that end up in the playoff conversation in December are almost always the ones that won the games they were supposed to win in October. Boring football, winning football. Same thing.

The key plays told the story you'd expect when a ranked team takes care of business. BYU's offense moved the ball in chunks when it needed to, and the defense did what good defenses do in league play, it took away the cheap stuff and made Iowa State earn every yard the long way. Field position games like that have a rhythm to them. The team that blinks on special teams usually pays for it, and the Cougars didn't blink.

I know Dave Morgan, our analytics guy, would want me to cite the success rates and the win probability swings, and I'm sure the numbers backed up what the eye test said here. But some Friday nights you just watch the game. The Cougars were the tougher team at the point of attack, and the scoreboard said so.

Where does this leave BYU? In a sentence, alive. The Big Twelve race is a grind this year, and a home loss to a scrappy Iowa State side would have cratered the whole month of November. Instead the Cougars keep their margin, keep their ranking, and keep the kind of momentum that compounds. I said last week, when I was writing about the playoff picture, that the teams outside the top 12 all have a reason to believe. BYU isn't outside looking in anymore. They're in the house, and the question now is whether they can hold the room.

The road doesn't soften from here. Conference games never do. But there's a difference between a team that wins pretty and a team that wins, and on this Friday night in Provo, BYU did the second thing. Ask any old-timer around that program which one they'd take. You already know the answer.