Per everyone (BON linked here), putative starting tackles Desmond Harrison and Kennedy Estelle have been suspended by Coach Strong for a violation of team rules. There was speculation yesterday evening that both guys had been kicked off the team entirely, but as of now it looks like they're certainly out for BYU but could return at some point in the season.
There's one team rule that constitutes upwards of 90% of "team rules" violations in college football, but there's been no solid confirmation as to exactly what these guys did to run afoul of Strong.
Allow me to use all of my talents and all of my skills as a semi-professional wordsmith to craft an image for you here:
This blows.
With Dom Espinosa already on the shelf, the offensive line goes from unsettled to borderline chaotic. You're most likely looking at a Hutchins-Flowers-Raulerson-James-Perkins front against BYU, with Doyle as the first man up in case of injury/punji trap/meteor strike. Unit cohesion and shared reps are as important as individual talent in this kind of blocking scheme, and those qualities figure to be in extremely short supply on Saturday. That kind of shuffling also puts pass protection communication and blitz pickup at risk, so we may be looking at brutally conservative alignments and game planning with an eye towards winning this game in the high teens rather than the low 20's.
Hopefully Strong and Bryan Harsin can share a drink sometime this offseason and compare notes on what it's like to think you're boarding a luxury liner for Maui and finding yourself jumping out of a Huey into Viet-fucking-nam. Strong is a straight shooter, but he's got one big fib on his resume so far. When he first addressed the team, he led with, "Y'all just got a good coaching staff fired."
If Charlie didn't know he was lying then, I bet he knows it now.