BYU football: Are fans' calls for Bronco's ousting justified?

The aftermath of BYU’s hard-fought loss at Boise State is just more proof that Bronco Mendenhall has the worst job in college football. Bill O’Brien at Penn State has nothing on Bronco. At least O’Brien has no expectations. None. Which is the exact opposite of what Mendenhall has to deal with at BYU.

That is only one reason that it’s time for Bronco to leave, on his own terms and for his own sake. He deserves better. His administration has hired him to do a very specific job, and winning is not part of that job description. Winning is a bonus. Add that to the list of things Charlie Sheen and BYU do not have in common.

BYU fans need to decide what they want. It is no longer possible for BYU’s football program to be both a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a consistent national championship contender. I wish it were.

Critics of this will point out 1984. BYU won a much-debated national championship, and it will forever be able to hang that national championship banner from the press box at LaVell Edwards Stadium. No one will be able to take that away from the Cougars or their fans. Not Ute fans. Not the Pac-12. Not me. No one. The Cougars were dominant for most of the Edwards era.

The reason they were had nothing to do with Edwards’ ability to bring in top-tier talent, because he didn’t. Ty Detmer, Steve Young, Jim McMahon and Robbie Bosco were outliers. They were great quarterbacks, and I take nothing away from them or BYU’s national championship, but the reason the Cougars were successful was because of a new scheme that was superior to anything college football had ever seen.

Detmer, Young, McMahon and Bosco were not the typical BYU athlete. Just like Cody Hoffman and Ross Apo are outliers today on BYU’s roster, those BYU legends were legends for a reason. They were incredible athletes, but the rest of the roster was not on par with what were the nation’s top-tier programs, just like today. The Cougars won because they were more disciplined and executed with flawless precision and a superior scheme.

The passing game was still a new thing when Edwards and Norm Chow realized that you could do it without getting penalized for an incompletion. BYU also had outstanding quarterbacks like the aforementioned. Fresh off the fiasco in Boise, BYU fans are painfully aware of the dramatic difference a good quarterback can make. There is no position in sports that makes a bigger difference to the success of a team.

Just like Urban Meyer brought a previously little-seen scheme to Utah in the early 2000s, Chow and Edwards brought an unparalleled downfield passing attack to BYU. It won the Cougars a national championship.

That takes nothing away from the 1984 Cougars. Having superior schemes is part of football. Utah’s 2004 team did not have nearly as much talent as USC that year, to even think so is laughable, but with Meyer’s spread attack the Utes would have competed with the Trojans that year.

Just like the spread offense Meyer made popular, that passing attack has come and gone. Obviously, people have learned how to defend it, and the Cougars can no longer utilize it to their advantage. Unless another transcendent scheme shows up in Provo sometime soon, the lack of depth and relatively weak talent will not allow them to compete for that elusive national title we hear about every September. Or the Cougars can go the route of Gary Crowton and bring in athletes who don’t represent the program, the institution or the church that owns it well in an attempt to compete with the big boys.

Tom Holmoe, Cecil Samuelson and the leaders of the LDS Church have made the priorities of the football program clear. They want it to act as a missionary and a tool to bring student-athletes in and to churn them out as strong young men prepared to go out into the world and act as “lights unto” it. That’s the goal.

Remember? Football fifth?

The program has sacrificed opportunities to join big conferences and experience potentially huge football success in order to fulfill this goal.

BYU fans, this is your program. This is the mission.

Just look at the current quarterback situation. In any other program, the head coach is fired for running off an All-American quarterback and replacing him with a quarterback like Riley Nelson. But Jake Heaps was a stuck-up, arrogant, entitled underachiever, while the returned missionary Nelson did everything right off the field. The result? Nelson reaps what he sows.

That said, expectations cannot be what they are for someone like Bronco Mendenhall, whose job it is to mentor young people and further a cause, not win football games. If you don’t like that, it’s time to move on to another program.

Sure, BYU gets recruits that it otherwise would not get because of its affiliation with the LDS Church. Heaps shouldn’t have received the hype he did as a recruit, but a recruit like that would never consider BYU if he weren’t a member of the LDS Church. However, with the program and Mendenhall’s goals, BYU is limited in the talent it can bring in. That has been a given at BYU forever.

Yet every year Mendenhall has to deal with outrageous expectations from a fan base he is already clearly annoyed with. Sure, sometimes he's contributed to the hype, but it’s had to rub off on him over the course of eight years.

To add to the expectations, he’s in a situation where one loss to a team with superior talent (Utah, Notre Dame, Georgia Tech, maybe even Boise State) and the season is over. Poinsettia Bowl or Armed Forces Bowl or whichever nationally insignificant bowl game you want to insert here, here we come.

That’s not good enough for a fan base after BYU won a national championship nearly 30 years ago. That’s not good enough for a fan base after BYU was one win away from becoming the first BCS Buster ever, then had to watch its arch-rival do just that. That’s not good enough for a fan base that is sick of winning 10 games every year.

If it were any other program with other goals, Mendenhall’s head might be on the chopping block. I could see the headlines now from December 2017: “Mendenhall fired despite another 10-win season.”

But that’s not going to happen. Mendenhall epitomizes the man the BYU administration wants as the face of its athletic department, and what does he get for it?

BYU fans calling for his head because he can’t win a big game against teams he shouldn’t be on the same field with athletically.

Unrealistically naïve expectations plus an undefeated-or-bust predicament plus a program and a fan base with divergent hopes equals the toughest job in college football.

Mendenhall deserves better from a fan base he’s overachieved for. An inability to recruit the talent to meet expectations yet almost yearly bowl victories and five 10-win seasons out of seven. That’s way more than fans can ask for, and it's way more than they should ask for at a program that gave up a shot at a basketball national championship to uphold its honor code.

Meanwhile, Brandon Davies’ courage to come forward and confess his mistakes when his perceived world would be lost was completely overlooked. There were no stories, very little praise and a lot of controversy. The story was whether or not Davies should be suspended, never about the faith and bravery it took for him to live what the school preaches in a time when that would be very hard to do.

If you think that BYU cares more about its success on the field or court than it does about its mission off it, you’re mistaken.

Meanwhile, Mendenhall works his tail off to do his job (the job he’s asked to do by church/school leaders, not Cougar fans), fulfill an institution’s higher vision and keep that vision’s balance in his own personal life.

So forget calling Holmoe and Samuelson and asking for Mendenhall’s head. Be lucky he stays. He has every reason to go. A lot of LDS coaches turn down opportunities to go to BYU and coach other sports simply because it would be easier to succeed elsewhere.

If I were him, I would leave. I would go back to being a defensive coordinator running around barefoot and having fun again or I would buy a nice beach house on Oahu and surf my brains out until the day I died. Think about it. When was the last time you saw Mendenhall smile?

He gets paid very little (relative to other college coaches) to do exactly what he is asked, if not more. He deserves more. He should take more … by leaving. You think Oregon or USC or West Virginia wouldn’t kill for his defense?

BYU fans are lucky to have him, but more importantly, the church is lucky to have him representing it. And the boys he turns into men are lucky to have him.

He may or may not be a very good head coach, but that’s only part of his job, a very small part — at least according to his employers. Being a college football head coach is tough, but it’s even tougher when you are also asked to be a motivational speaker, mentor, missionary and father figure. Considering all that, Mendenhall has the toughest job in college football, and he does a pretty darn good job at it.

Trevor Amicone is the founder of byutahinsiders.com, which covers BYU, Utah and national college football with weekly polls, bowl projections, opinions and analysis. Follow its new Twitter page at @BYUtahInsiders and Trevor's at @TrevorAmicone.

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