Rise, shout: Football is back at BYU

With a lopsided win over Air Force on the road Saturday, BYU's football team tightened its stranglehold on first place in the conference standings and solidified the growing feeling that these guys are for real.

BYU football is back. Coach Bronco Mendenhall has righted the ship. The Cougs are 6-2, with only two field goals separating them from an unbeaten start.

More importantly, as far as BYU and its owners are concerned, is the way the Cougars are winning — with athletes who fit the school, not a school that tries to fit the athletes.

BYU is not for everyone, as we discovered with shocking clarity during the Gary Crowton era. Mendenhall has broadcast that fact repeatedly, and now he's competing with a combination of gospel and football, as opposed to the gospel of football.

From the start, he said he would depend on LDS players or players familiar with the culture who shared their values. To some he sounded naive. How could he survive strictly with "BYU-type kids"? Wouldn't he have to supplement them with a few blue-chip gambles?

Mendenhall has stayed the course, even after a rough start (6-6 last season, including a loss to Utah, a 1-2 start this season). He talked the talk and now he's walking it. He said he would field a certain type of player come heck or high water, and that's what he's done.

The Cougars not only have accepted who they are, but they seem to revel in it. Mendenhall wears it on his sleeve. In public, he talks about what type of player he will bring to the school repeatedly (and does so in a voice so quiet and calm that he could be teaching a Sunday school class). He quotes scriptures and General Conference talks in team meetings.

"I like it, but I'm a little surprised by how much he does it," says one player.

Gary Crowton had good intentions and he has proved to be a first-rate coach — look what he's done at Oregon. But at the first sign of trouble at BYU he recruited athletes who were either from out of state and/or non-LDS players who had no real clue about the culture, even after they read and signed the honor code. For them, coming to Provo was like being dropped onto another planet.

Ironically, not only did the Cougars run into horribly embarrassing problems off the field, they didn't even win on the field for all their troubles. One BYU official, who asks not to be identified, said when he saw one of Crowton's recruiting classes, "I thought it was a time bomb." When it exploded, it ultimately cost Athletic Director Val Hale and Crowton their jobs.