BYU Football: Why the Cougars Remain Outsiders to BCS League Alignment

Stewart Mandel of Sports Illustrated summed this up in spot-on fashion in one of his posts on realignment about BYU recently: “ recent shuffling has left us with a particularly intriguing free agent, a tradition-rich program that's posted four straight 10-win seasons, plays in a 64,000-seat stadium and is itching for a new home after watching its hated rival suddenly achieve BCS affiliation”

How has it come to this for BYU?

This is a program that had clearly outgrown its Western Athletic Conference affiliation by the mid 1980s, and for years many fans thought the Cougars would simply follow the natural progression observed less than a decade earlier by their old Arizona WAC rivals. 

Typically conference realignment demands a travel partner, and during the 1970s and 1980s Utah was hardly worthy of moving up to the PAC-10, Big-8 or SWC, which were all the bigger leagues in those days that had potential geographical footprints at the time that overlapped the post Arizona school WAC.

While a stellar performer in the old Mountain States Conference (1938-1961) and the early years of the original WAC configuration, for a 2 decade stretch Utah was hardly competitive against a rival they had dominated for 4 decades (Utah had lost only 2 games to BYU from 1922-1965), and losing records and half empty stadiums became typical for what had been the flagship program in attendance and following as a new and very different rival emerged 40 miles to the south.

From 1972 -1992 the wining roles would be reversed.  But by the 1990s it became obvious that the “Boise State aura” surrounding BYU had worn off as the program stagnated during the final years of the LaVell Edwards era in a league that had finally started to show increasing numbers of schools willing to challenge BYU, and Utah in particular showed resolve by finishing .500 against the Cougars for the decade.

But as college football rolled into the dawn of the BCS era where conferences increasingly were called upon to deliver television revenue to their membership as the College Football Association dissolved, leagues began to realign as a result.  

Realignment was at best a once every 2 decade event in the earlier era, but TV revenue posed an issue to the Big-8 and the disillusion of the SWC presented an opportunity that also surprisingly to BYU fans showed some interest and perhaps a more possible than the desired future alignment for their school when in 1994 then President Rex E. Lee publicly stated that officials from the forthcoming Big 12 had shown a very strong interest in adding the Cougars.

But perhaps one earlier mistake administration officials at BYU would make would be to yearn for a reunion with their former WAC rivals from Arizona in an enlarged PAC-10 since vast numbers of BYU alumni resided within the communities of that league along the west coast and desert southwest.

It would take a not so positive set of alignment talks with the PAC-10 during the late 1990s, to bring reality forward despite the thinking that the potential market BYU could bring would overcome the religious governance objections some administrators in the PAC-10 have had about BYU.

This brings to point why many including myself look at BYU and question why they have not been more visibly pro-active in this re-alignment endeavor as we’ve observed administration officials at Utah in recent years.

Perhaps some recent comments from BYU Athletic Director Tom Holmoe at a press conference question and answer session given on 16 July 2010 can shed more light on this subject:   “While expansion and realignment has been at the forefront for the past six months, BYU "has been working on this for three years." He says the challenge has been that BYU is in the middle of realignment, without necessarily being on the inside .

"There are ongoing conversations about membership," Holmoe said.

This clearly indicates that conference alignment is a highly politically sensitive issue with respects to various members of the BYU Board of Trustees, and part of why Holmoe’s two immediate predecessors at his post had relatively short five-year tenures each.  

But it is also obvious by Holmoe’s comments that BYU has had some constructive contacts and would likely have been included or made a more favorable landing if any 16 school super-league alignments had such a scenario unfolded last month.

It should also be noted that Holmoe has put less emphasis on scheduling non conference games against PAC-10 opponents over the past three years, but has increasingly shifted the focus to the Big 12.  

Many who serve on the BYU Board of Trustees won’t hesitate for a minute to point out how the success of the football program and overall athletic profile of the school has been an effective missionary tool for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but also has enabled the schools endowment fund to grow to the nearly $850 million level that it has become over the past 25 years.

But on the other hand there might be others who will be concerned about a good thing becoming too big and overwhelming other neighboring schools.

The question now is, with Utah having moved officially to the PAC-10 (12) starting in 2011, will that concern diminish to any degree?