You Don't Know What You've Got 'Til It's Gone

Of all the things that make me homesick, one of the most surprising has been how much I miss the BYU Football games. UT games (I hear, we aren't going to one until Nov 8) are humid, drunken, crowded, profanity-filled affairs---and this year's team is horrible, which doesn't exactly inspire any newly-developing pride. I miss my beautiful little stadium with a beautiful view of the mountains and wearing a hoodie on and a crisp Fall Saturday afternoon. I didn't fully appreciate BYU football games when I was in Provo, and now they are gone. Talk about a tragedy.

And to make matters worse . . . its an amazing year for BYU football.
If you have any tender feelings toward BYU football at all, read this article. It will only cause those tender feelings to swell within you.

It's about this year's team and includes an interview with Mr. Bronco Mendenhall.
Some of my favorite parts:

[When he first got to BYU, Bronco took his players to the top of Y mountain and had them look at the valley and campus below them.] Mendenhall pointed out how relatively small the Cougars stadium appeared among the community that surrounds it. "It was to gain perspective, not only in looking from the top down, but to see possibly where football really fits into this whole thing," Mendenhall says. "It's not very big."

"It's not all about football here," junior tight end Dennis Pitta says. "Obviously, if we're able to play well on the field, that helps represent our faith and our institution in a positive way."

The team at Mormon-church-sponsored BYU, whose coach encourages the players to keep football fifth on their priority list — behind, in order, faith, family, knowledge and friends — is playing so well it is the midseason favorite to represent non-BCS schools in a big-money bowl. [If we stay undefeated and don't make it to the BCS: me=ANGRY].

[This is why I love BYU as an institution. Here's Bronco:] "I was having the final interview for this job with a member of what we call the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles," a church leadership group that serves as the university's board of trustees, says Mendenhall, a Mormon who grew up on a ranch about 15 miles northwest of Provo. "He didn't ask any questions about football. He was only asking about things of a spiritual nature and the development of young people."

Mendenhall, 42, spent his first two hours on the job, he says, praying on his knees by the couch in his office. Within days, he identified three guiding principles: tradition, spirit and honor. He said people affiliated with the school warned him that including spirit would "make you a target."
"I said, 'This institution is founded on that. That's what we represent.' "

In choreographing the Cougars' resurgence, Mendenhall is trying things unheard of at college football's top level. The entire team, coaches included, takes Sundays off. No practice lasts longer than 90 minutes. Coaches leave their offices by 6:30 p.m. every day, including Mendenhall, who has three sons, ages 8, 6 and 5. [Family first;-)]
I am sick already over the Holy War. If both teams are still undefeated, and BYU's BCS chances are depending on a win, that game will be so intense. I'll be so sick, and I won't even be able to watch it. My BYU pride has really swelled as of late, and there is nothing quite like rubbing BYU's success in the faces of rabid Tennessee football fans.

I love our boys.

Go, Cougs.