BYU football: Tonight a 'very big game'

FORT WORTH — For BYU, the Road to the BCS goes through Amon G. Carter Stadium.

The No. 9 Cougars (6-0, 2-0) clash tonight with TCU (6-1, 3-0), marking a Mountain West Conference showdown that carries league championship implications as well as national implications.

"It's a very big game," said defensive lineman Jan Jorgensen. "It's great to be able to go out on a Thursday night on a national stage and have an opportunity to play a great top 25 team like TCU (ranked No. 24 in the USA Today coaches' poll)."

Since the Horned Frogs joined the conference in 2005, there have been memorable battles between the two programs. There was the 51-50 TCU win in Provo in 2005, when the Frogs scored a controversial touchdown in overtime. There was BYU's 31-17 defeat of TCU in 2006 as the Cougars snapped the then-No. 15 Frogs' 13-game winning streak. A year ago, BYU edged TCU, 27-22, in a contest that came down to the final minutes.

In each of those seasons, the winner of the BYU-TCU tilt has claimed the MWC title, stoking the flames of this emerging rivalry.

"This game has conference championship implications every single year," Jorgensen said. "One of their coaches came up to me after the game last year and said, 'No more BYU-Utah crap. We want the BYU-TCU rivalry going on.' It's a big game for both teams.

It's been that way the last three or four years since they got into the conference. I think it's going to continue to be that way."

While BYU boasts a top-10 ranking and is eying a BCS berth, TCU has an ample supply of motivation. The Frogs are aiming to halt BYU's 18-game conference winning streak and 16-game winning streak overall, not to mention spoil the Cougars' dreams of earning a BCS bid.

"We've been talking about the BYU game since last January," TCU coach Gary Patterson said this week. "They are the team that has won the conference the last two seasons, so that has to be the mileage marker where you set your sights."

The BYU game, in fact, has become the most important one on TCU's schedule, according to Patterson.

"I think we are growing up as a program," he said. "Big 12 teams are fun to play, but the bottom line of it is you've got to win your conference ball games against the top teams in your conference 'I will say this to you — since January there has been a helmet on the blocking dummy downstairs with a Y on it.'"