Mendenhall intense on football field, relaxed at home

PROVO — Around BYU, with his football team, he's Mr. Intensity.

At home in Alpine, with his other team, Bronco Mendenhall is simply dad.

Mendenhall, the Cougars' new head coach, and his wife, Holly, are the parents of three sons — Cutter, 5; Breaker, 3; and Raeder, 18 months. When he's with the family, Mendenhall sheds his intense demeanor, Holly says.

"He's relaxed with our boys," she says. "He's a great daddy. He gets down on the floor and crawls around with them and puts on costumes and does everything a great dad does. He's really attentive to them. And he's involved with them. I always chuckle inside because he can be so intense. He can do the pendulum and go both ways. The boys adore him."

The day after Gary Crowton resigned, Bronco told the Deseret Morning News about the joy of going home and spending time with his young family during a period of great uncertainty.

Not surprisingly, the last few days have been crazy around the Mendenhall household, ever since Bronco learned he would be replacing Crowton at the helm of Cougar football. "The phone's been ringing off the hook and people have been coming over, giving me hugs," Holly says.

As for the kids, "They don't know what in the heck is going on," she says.

One of the boys understands something about his dad's job.

"My 3-year-old wears his BYU Cougar hat all the time. He puts it by his bed when he goes to sleep at night and puts it on first thing in the morning," Holly says. "Now, whenever he sees the letter Y. — he doesn't know his letters — he says, 'There's a BYU Cougar.' We're starting him young, I guess."

Then again, being a BYU Cougar is in the Mendenhall genes.

When Bronco was a youngster, he was a diehard Cougar fan. His father, Paul, was a BYU defensive lineman in the 1950s, and his older brother, Mat, was a BYU defensive lineman in the 1970s. During the years Mat played for the Cougars, Bronco never missed a game, home or away. Paul, a longtime member of the Cougar Club, would take Bronco out of school to travel to places like Fort Collins and Laramie to watch BYU play.

The Mendenhall clan is, of course, thrilled to see Bronco, who, at 38, is the second-youngest Division I head coach in the country, take the reins of BYU football.