PROVO — BYU may not have looked like a top-10 team Saturday at LaVell Edwards Stadium, but at least the No. 9 Cougars made things interesting.

And so did New Mexico.

After trailing at home for the first time this season, albeit by just 3-0, BYU scored 21 unanswered points over the final three quarters and held off the gritty Lobos, 21-3.

While many fans and pundits expected BYU to cruise to a blowout victory, it was pretty much what coach Bronco Mendenhall said it would be — a physical, tough, Mountain West Conference battle.

Late in the fourth quarter, the Cougars led 14-3 before a game-clinching drive — capped by an eight-yard touchdown pass from Max Hall to Austin Collie — sealed the deal with 3:05 remaining.

"It's a great win for our football team in the way that it came — hard-fought, inch-by-inch, foot-by-foot," Mendenhall said afterward. "I don't expect any of the games from this point on to be easy. It's a great transition, a bridge, from the first five games to what's to come."

The Cougars know an even tougher battle is looming Thursday night when they travel to TCU.

"This is conference play. Teams are going to do everything they can to disrupt what we're doing," said Hall, who completed 22 of 34 passes for 265 yards and three touchdowns. "New Mexico is a good football team. They have a good defense. They did a great job against us. Teams are going to figure out ways to confuse us and put pressure on us. A 21-3 win is big-time in a conference game."

Certainly, it was much more difficult than home wins in September over UCLA and Wyoming.

"I think UCLA spoiled us a little bit," Hall said. "We're not going to win every game 59-0. The rest of these games are going to be dogfights. I'll take 21-3 every time."

New Mexico coach Rocky Long, for one, expected a tight game. In fact, he expected it to be much closer than 21-3.

"BYU is a great football team and they deserve their ranking, but this should have been close to the end," Long said. "We came here to win, not to keep it close."

The final score may not help the Cougars when the polls are released today, but defensive lineman Jan Jorgensen doesn't care about that. "If we start worrying about the polls, we're going to get sidetracked and we won't focus on what we need to focus on and we'll lose," he said.

Saturday's game was a chess match, with both teams playing conservatively for much of the contest. The Lobos relied on the ground game and its bruising running back, Rodney Ferguson, who rushed for 86 yards on 24 carries. New Mexico's offense had possession for 32:31, compared to 27:29 for BYU — which was a main focus of the Lobos' game plan — to keep the ball away from the Cougar offense.