BYU Football Team Has Signature Win in 2018: Fulfilling the Promise

BYU Football Team Has Signature Win in 2018: Fulfilling the Promise

Ahh, victory and success!

Triumph on the gridiron by your team. Your team, your childhood favorite, it then became your college and its campus an extension of you, the stadium and its team and community an extension of your hopes and expectations of glory; it became your alma mater, and it has the chance to come out on top.

Winning.

It's a drug that some of us Brigham Young University fans have not had enough of in the past 4 years. Or ten years. Or even 40 years.  Certainly BYU fans back to its inception in 1922 did not enjoy enough wins or success way back then, when it was a marginal institution of football competition at best for decades.

However, by the 1970s with legendary coach Lavell Edwards, the BYU football team became a name brand and started to define success where there was nothing before, a Rose Blossoming in the Desert, to borrow a phrase from the Holy Bible, and more particularly Latter-day Saint scriptures, like the Book of Mormon and the less known, but still valued by members of this odd (to many outsiders) faith, the Doctrine and Covenants.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had established itself in the mountains of the inter-mountain west by the mid 1800s, in the Promised Land of the the Americas, in the burgeoning United States with its promise of prosperity and hope to the world. It was all based on latter-day prophesy, and it moved thousands, tens of thousands. Which became millions.

Thousands upon thousands of missionaries, generation after generation, self-proclaimed emissaries of Jesus Christ and His Church of the last Restoration of All Things, would go forth from the Great Salt Lake and other Utah valleys and communities, from the extended Deseret  of Idaho and Arizona, Wyoming and California and the expanding sphere of Latter-day Saint world to the international realm, to bring its version of the Zion foretold of old, fulfilling the promises of the Lord over the millenia.

BYU, its flagship school in Provo, Utah, was a part and parcel of that vision. And: the football team became the embodied symbol of the force and the hope of those dreams. At least, that is, for a few million, or perhaps a few hundred thousand of us.  Especially us sports nuts in North America. Which happens to be where most elders originate from, many of us driven and motivated by sports like football.

BYU football was different from Ohio State or Alabama or Notre Dame or Michigan or USC: it had players that already had given two full years of their lives in the streets of Peru or Taiwan preaching this Gospel around the world, young men who walked away from the highly physical sport of football to do a "soft" thing: spread a faith while dressed in suits and ties. Thousands of quarterbacks, running backs, receivers, defensive backs and linebackers, who depend on lightning quick skills, spent thousands of hours visiting the homes of the widows, orphans, and those that lie on the margins of society.  If they were lucky they got some recreational basketball or soccer in a week.

A former returned missionary who had great football success at Wisconsin in the 1990s, Darrell Bevell, was a potential quarterback during his mission in Cleveland in the 1990s, and would throw a football for half an hour daily during his mission. Perhaps the current Brigham Young QB Tanner Mangum did not have that luxury in northern Chile during his service as a church missionary.

But, ironically, it was his and other BYU teammates skills and efforts that took down the mighty Wisconsin Badgers (where that former missionary took them to the Rose Bowl in halcyon years 30 years ago), a nationally ranked 6th best team, among recent national champions Alabama and Clemson in this current early season of 2018.

We beat Wisconsin at home, the first non-conference foe to do that in Madison since 2003!

Wow! This is the ecstasy that I remember from the 1980s when I first watched the juggernaut of the BYU Cougars charging into enemy fields of UCLA or Missouri or Miami and slaying Goliaths of the the gridiron. Perennial top ranked teams were these Polynesians and howlies of Provo, never disrespected as a lesser power, but a name among the greats like Florida State or Penn State or Texas. They made the college football landscape change because of their sustained successes.

Us Latter-day Saints (or at least many young folks and alumni who were LDS or associated in the US) had a name and a reputation through this team on the field; it stood not only for success, but virtue in that the school Honor Code which meant no tobacco, alcohol, excessive socialization, was cool. And this virtuous living and life choices would lead to many footballers getting married and even having children at those young ages when other athletes across the land were famous for carousing. That was a the goal: to espouse the Lord's values in a popular domain. BYU football teams at holiday season bowls would have infants running around their booked hotel rooms.  Brigham Young University grew to make the San Diego-based Holiday Bowl a real event, because of the contract that lead the Western Athletic Conference champion there yearly, which became a trend by the late 1980s.

Enter yesterday: the euphoria, the excitement, the thrill of the upset of a top 10 team on the road, the first time for BYU to do this since 1984. Little BYU won the national championship that year.

This is the feeling of reigning triumphant, like during and after the season of 1996 when I was living in Provo, when BYU beat Kansas State in the highest bowl ever achieved, the Cotton Bowl, finishing ranked number seven in the national polls. Three years from Coach Edwards' retirement.

The succession of his coaches has been choppy at times, and third year Coach Kilane Sitake had some things to prove. Especially after a terrible second year.

Mission accomplished, for today. The season is long.

But now, with arguably their best win in perhaps the last 8 years, and even the best win among their best 5 or 10 ever, we have hope. Cougar fans, assemble! Rise and shout!

The hope and the promise of the mighty Cougars has awoken. It is a long season. And it should be fun. Much more fun than anticipated by professional analysts and longtime fans alike.

Nine games to go. And then the bowl. That will happen assuredly, unlike last year's anemic 4-9 attempt, its worst results since the 1950s, back when Lavell Edwards was maybe playing on some field with buddies, perhaps. 

No, this BYU team will live up to something better, something stronger, something that it has been known for since the 1970s:

The BYU Cougars will play anyone anywhere, and we will beat you, and you better take notice. The average BYU player is older, perhaps more mature, they have lived in funny places and speak a lot of second languages, they are not supposed to curse or have radical hair styles, they do not "party" in the traditional sense of wine and women.

But they play the game. They are competitive. Get ready, and have fun. The Cougars are out!

Like a service academy of Army or Navy or Air Force, BYU represents a tougher standard of living. Not to train to launch grenades or missiles. But to launch the Gospel of the Irredeemable Love of Jesus and His faith. And they will knock your socks off on the field. Makes for good weekend entertainment.

That is how it was meant to be since 1922, or at least since the 1970s. Almost 100 years later, the visions of the prophets lives among the gridiron players of the 21st century of Brigham Young, the man selected by God, whose academy now carries his name, the founding prophet in the midst of the mountains, the head lair of the Mormons. Yes, current President Nelson, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Check.

Rise and shout. The Cougars are back out.

Next opponent, please. I can get used to this.