BYU football: Fired-up Cougars power past Air Force, 38-24

AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. — Trailing Air Force by four points at halftime, BYU looked like it needed a pep talk. Recognizing that, junior receiver Austin Collie delivered a fiery speech to his teammates in the locker room.

"He just told us that we're better than this," said Cougar quarterback Max Hall. "He said, 'This is not who we are; this is not how we play.' He got us all fired up and ready to go for the second half."

Collie's words helped spur BYU on to a 21-point, third-quarter blitzkrieg, and in the end, the Cougars earned a 38-24 victory over Air Force Saturday at Falcon Stadium.

"We're one of the best teams in the nation, and we need to start playing like it," Collie recalled telling his teammates at intermission. "These past couple of games, we've kind of walked out there like zombies. We haven't had that much emotion. We came in the second half and really stepped it up emotionally, and we got after it. ... I like to let my play to do the talking. We needed someone to step up and get in these guys' faces and say, 'This isn't how we play football' ... I raised my voice a little bit, but I wasn't throwing chairs around or anything like that."

Collie not only talked the talk, he backed it up by scoring two second-half touchdowns, including a game-clinching 45-yarder with 4:46 remaining.

"It fired everybody up," defensive lineman Jan Jorgensen said of Collie's halftime address. "It's what we've been needing for a while.

It was good. He got everybody excited. Sometimes we come out with a workmanlike attitude instead of being excited and being fired up, ready to go."

In their previous three games, the Falcons had held their opponents scoreless in the second half. The Cougars obliterated that streak, scoring three unanswered touchdowns, all in drives that took less than 3 1/2 minutes.

Even still, Air Force (8-3, 5-2) battled back from a 17-point deficit in the fourth quarter before BYU (10-1, 6-1) held on for the victory. The Cougars enter next week's rivalry showdown against undefeated Utah at Rice-Eccles Stadium on a four-game winning streak and with a shot at claiming a piece of the title.

Against the Falcons, BYU committed plenty of gaffes in the form of penalties, turnovers and allowing some big Air Force plays on offense.

But, in the end, the Cougars left Colorado Springs having snapped the Falcons' five-game winning streak.

"We knew it would be a difficult football game, as it turned out to be," coach Bronco Mendenhall said of the win over the Falcons. "I was also proud of our team, overcoming our own miscues, going on the road to win our 10th game and having a chance for a conference championship again."