Despite 40 years of pushback, BYU is here. And the Cougs are just getting started.

I'm old enough to remember the 2001 BYU football season. I don't remember with a ton of detail, but I remember Brandon Doman and Luke Staley running over the entire world and winning a whole bunch of games. I remember Gary Crowton, whose team was 12-0 going into their final game of the season, complaining that the BCS system was going out of its way to keep BYU from making a BCS game. The Cougars were one of two undefeated teams at the time and topped out as a 12-seed. Even if they had beaten Hawaii in their 13th game of the season, that wouldn't have pushed them into a BCS game.

I'm not old enough to remember the 80s, but that run in 2001 conjured up enough memories for a lot of longtime BYU fans that I definitely heard the stories. I heard about Bryant Gumbel complaining about BYU playing 'Bo Diddley Tech' in 1984. I hear about the NBC Broadcast of the Orange Bowl that year that didn't even mention BYU until the third quarter, and when they did, they talked about BYU's legendary head coach, "Ladell Anderson."

I have vague memories (I was 7 years old, folks, come on) of BYU getting snubbed in 1996. Despite having a better record than four of the six Bowl Alliance teams who were selected for Alliance Bowl games, BYU was left out, citing an early-season loss on the road to Washington as the reason that BYU was obviously not worthy of a better bowl game.

I'm old enough to remember the PAC-12 passing on BYU multiple times. Whether it was when they grew from the PAC-8 to the PAC-10, or from the PAC-10 to the PAC-12, they nary entertained the thought of adding BYU. The Big 12 passed on BYU in the 90s, passed on any expansion (because they didn't want to add BYU) when they lost Colorado, and then passed again in 2016. It wasn't until Texas and Oklahoma left the conference for dead along the shore of a lava river like a chopped-up Anakin Skywalker that the Big 12 finally decided they could live with BYU.

I remember 2020 when the college football world shut down due to COVID-19. Conferences throughout the country took zero issues with cancelling their games with the Cougars and throwing them right back to the banks of the lava river. BYU Macgyvered a schedule full of lesser teams who were willing to play football and proved to the college football world that you could play football during the pandemic. When the rest of the country figured that out and followed BYU's lead, they had the audacity to complain about BYU's strength of schedule and refuse to acknowledge that the Cougars might be a good team. They suddenly felt all kinds of vindication when the Cougars lost a game that was scheduled on three-days notice across the country.

The college football world has never been loving or friendly to BYU. In fact, in most years, the college football world has actively tried to keep BYU out of the college football. They have viewed the Cougars as some kind of outsider and some kind of problem.

And yet, the Cougars have survived. It's like the Cougars have been a freight ship with a bum engine getting ready to pass through the pirate-ridden seas off the coast of Somalia. Somehow, miraculously, the Cougars have floated their way through the storm successfully. Somehow, they have remained unscathed despite everyone around them looking at them side-eyed, hoping they would disappear.

This brings us to today. The Cougars have found their footing in this new era of college football. The Big 12 finally let the Cougars in (and now the model is evolving towards a Power 2 and BYU is finding themselves scrapping for relevancy once again, but I digress), and the courts have allowed players to get paid. Teams across the country who have had every advantage over a program like BYU for decades are scrambling to figure out how to adapt and survive.

BYU, on the other hand, is finding its groove. BYU has been bloody-knuckle fighting for survival and relevancy for decades. And now that the old-timers are in this fight, they're struggling to figure it out. Frankly, they don't like it.

Remember when Batman first fought Bane in the cave prison? Batman was unbeatable in Gotham, but when he didn't have every advantage, that cave prison fight turned south for him pretty quickly. Bane started kicking his butt and Batman thought he could turn the tides on Bane with one last advantage by killing the lights. Bane's reaction is an all-timer of a line.

"Oh, you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark; I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man, and by then, it was nothing to me but blinding." 

BYU is in the midst of a recruiting heater. They landed AJ Dybantsa, and the college basketball world cried foul because BYU's NIL program was unfair. BYU landed Rob Wright in hoops or a couple of football transfers out of the portal, and all of a sudden, it's because BYU is cheating and tampering. Yesterday, BYU landed five-star quarterback Ryder Lyons, and fans along the West Coast scoffed and complained about BYU simply overpaying players and other teams - OREGON AND NIKE - can't keep up.

Ladies and gentlemen, BYU was born in the dark. They have been fighting for decades. They didn't see the light of a single advantage until they grew up. BYU's DNA is survival. BYU has never known what the inside of the club looks like because they've never been allowed in. But now that the club burned down and the party has moved to the streets, BYU is supposed to change?! The Cougars are supposed to lie down and let the people who have spat on them for 40 years just rebuild the club again?

Whether it's because BYU has been winning on the field, or because they are finally in the Big 12, or because they are having some success getting players to the professional ranks, or if it's simply because of big, giant bags of money, I have one thing to say to the rest of the college football world:

I saw people complain about not respecting teams that pay top dollar for players.

We don't care.

I saw people lament that no player would ever choose BYU unless money was involved because BYU has no history.

We don't care.

I had one guy call me 'soak boy' and contend that BYU only landed Lyons because they are paying him millions while he's on his mission.

We don't care.

BYU is here. They are winning. They are sending guys to the professional ranks. They do have money to pay players. They do have well-respected and likeable coaches. BYU is here, and they are, for the first time, working with a quiver that is actually full of arrows, and they look like Katniss Everdeen when they get rolling.

Nobody knows exactly what the future of college athletics will look like tomorrow, but BYU is here today. And there isn't a damn thing the college sports world can do to change that.

BYU is here. We don't care what you think of us. And we're just getting started.