GAME NOTES: The 18th-ranked BYU Cougars continue their quest to be considered for a BCS Bowl bid, taking on the San Diego State Aztecs in a Mountain West Conference showdown at Qualcomm Stadium on Saturday.

The Cougars currently boast a 5-1 record, second only to their 6-0 start a year ago since the 2001 campaign, and have reason to believe they will be in the BCS mix once the postseason rolls around. Granted, BYU still has TCU and Utah, both nationally-ranked programs, still remaining on the schedule, but the squad is still thinking positive as it plays the first of back-to-back games on the road this weekend.

Last week, the Cougars won their third straight outing as they put up a season-high 59 points in a 38-point rout of UNLV to move to 2-0 in MWC play. BYU enters the week tied with Wyoming atop the conference standings, although the Cowboys have a 4-2 record overall.

As for the Aztecs, already 0-1 in conference play, they snapped a two-game slide back on October 3rd with a 34-17 defeat of New Mexico State at home. Despite showing a 2-3 record at the moment, SDSU has the luxury of playing four of the next five games at home before closing out the regular season with bouts at Utah and UNLV.

BYU had little trouble in the meeting last year with the Aztecs, claiming a 41-12 win to move to 25-7-1 in the all-time series.

As if trying to downplay the efforts of his team in their crushing defeat of UNLV last weekend, BYU head coach Bronco Mendenhall kept his comments rather reserved following the game.

"I thought we played a good game and improved in a lot of areas. I thought our running game looked really good."

Looking really good is certainly an understatement given that Harvey Unga posted a season-high 149 yards on 20 carries and played for less than three quarters. The team as a whole put up 291 yards on the ground, averaging almost seven yards per attempt along the way.

"Harvey is a really good football player, he's very consistent," Mendenhall said of his running back who was named the MWC Offensive Player of the Week after scoring three touchdowns against the Rebels.

Quarterback Max Hall converted all but six of his 27 pass attempts for 320 yards, with touchdowns to JJ DiLuigi and Dennis Pitta. It was the first game his season that Hall had not thrown an interception.

While the BYU rushing attack was pummeling the UNLV defense, the Cougars kept the home team from getting anything going on the ground, limiting the Rebels to a mere 45 yards on 19 attempts. The pass defense did surrender 292 yards to Mike Clausen and Omar Clayton, but also recorded three interceptions against the signal-caller duo, with Scott Johnson coming up with a pair of picks.

The pass defense has been somewhat suspect for the Cougars so far this season, allowing 224.7 ypg. Granted, the squad has posted seven interceptions, but that is still three shy of the 10 tossed by Hall as he tries to finish his tenure in Provo on a positive note.

Beating up on overmatched opponents has allowed the Cougars to boost their scoring average to 38.7 ppg, tops in the MWC and eighth in the nation, but throw out the 113 combined points tallied against UNLV and Tulane and this BYU program isn't quite as good as the numbers make it out to be in 2009.

Hall has the best pass efficiency rating (162.57) in the conference and ranks sixth in the nation, but had he not brought the team back against Oklahoma in the opener and the defense not knocked out Sam Bradford, critics might be taking their shots at the signal-caller right now.

For many teams, having a bye week is a time for players to rest nagging injuries and take a brief break from the rigors of the schedule, but not for San Diego State and head coach Brady Hoke.

"It's really going to be us getting better at what we're doing right now. You always will tweak things, what you see defensively or offensively within the structure of what you do for a game plan, but at the same time we've got so many improvements that we need to make that we've got to get better at right now."

Unfortunately, coach Hoke and the Aztecs don't have all that much time to prepare for the mighty Cougars. Starting quarterback Ryan Lindley will be trying to figure out ways to improve upon his efforts from last season when he completed 20-of-35 passes for just 150 yards, one touchdown and an interception in the lopsided loss to BYU on the road. Lindley is optimistic that he and the rest of the offense have improved since last year, but they'll have a better idea of just where they stand once they take the field on Saturday.

"I think we're growing as an offense...I think the biggest thing is guys kind of have it down to where they know the routes, just schematically understanding the way things works, we just need to keep understanding how that works and how maybe you aren't going to get the ball but you're working to get another guy open and just the way everything works with 11 guys on field working to get a first down or move the chains."

Last year, Lindley threw just nine interceptions in 427 attempts, allowing him to pile up more than 2,600 yards through the air and 16 touchdowns, but the numbers in 2009 tell the story of a guy who has taken a step backward in his development. After just five games, the quarterback has already tossed nine picks in just 178 attempts and has only eight TDs.

And if Lindley was hoping the rushing attack for the Aztecs would step up and take some of the heat, he's in for a rude awakening because right now the squad ranks last in the MWC and 114th in the nation with just 78 ypg on the ground. Brandon Sullivan is listed as the top running back with an average of about 43 ypg, but he has not played in the last two contests, which is another reason why the Aztecs are not reaching their potential right now either.

From a defensive standpoint, the Aztecs appear to have a strong coverage group that has held opponents to just 161.8 ypg through the air, but again a closer look into that stat reveals that much of that number comes from giving up a mere 51 yards passing to an Air Force squad that rarely puts the ball in the air.

With so much time off the Aztecs are bound to be more sluggish than anything else, which is why the home team might find itself trailing by a significant margin early in the contest and not able to catch up, just like so many BYU opponents the last few seasons.