Take a deep breath and accept this challenge of the day, this 88-word doozy:

Name any super-successful college football coach of this ego-charged era, an era when such a coach is revered by his team’s fans, is king of his realm, is paid a gazillion dollars to wear a sweatshirt on his back and a whistle around his neck, for that matter, name a top coach of any era, who would answer the question posed to BYU’s Kalani Sitake the way he answered it. He has to really mean it, checking false humility at the door. Go ahead and try.

Q. How did you get so good at your job?

A. “Yeah, um, well, I’m not quite sure about that. I think I’m just as surprised as everybody else.”

Nick Saban? Nah. Kirby Smart? Nope. Lincoln Riley? Uh-uh. Kyle Whittingham? Not exactly. Lane Kiffin? Make me laugh. Woody Hayes? Negative. Bo Schembechler? Puh-lease.

There’s basically only one name, one answer: LaVell Edwards.

Sitake would be pleased with the comp. And that’s kind of a theme here.

During a recent isolated, two-hour sit-down-and-rap session with Sitake in a lounge adjacent to BYU’s football offices, the coach took the time to talk about his life, but even more to bear his soul. You might not believe what you hear, but you’ll hear it anyway. And there’s evidence of sincerity that’s hard to fake.

The subject of football, the technical aspect of it, was almost an afterthought. His decision to stay at his alma mater even after Penn State flashed more money at him than he’d ever be able to spend just sort of happened. It wasn’t an easy call on his part, but BYU, despite some of its imperfections, is his home. He wanted to stay home. And he got paid here, too.

It’s not as though Sitake holds himself in low regard, or that he is insecure or ignorant about his own abilities and achievements, or that money is insignificant to him. He’s human, after all, a proud man who grew up poor, with financial despair to the left, desperation to the right, and a whole lot to prove in between.

“We had some difficult situations back then,” he says. “Dealing with poverty and just trying to get things done. Growing up, being raised by a single father, the family struggled at times. My parents divorced when I was 6; my mom moved to Australia. And we moved around, living in places like Hawaii, the Bay Area, St. Louis, Utah. My dad worked different, weird jobs. We knew we didn’t have much, but we also felt very blessed.”

Sitake stops short of diving too deep into the details of his early life, but lessons regarding principles and priorities came at him as though they were fired out of a howitzer. He absorbed how to survive and, ultimately, how to thrive.

That was a long time ago, and Sitake says it feels good now to have punched economic distress, the threat of destitution, straight in the mouth and to give validation a warm embrace via his coaching career. But the way he sees it, there’s much more hugging to do, more growth, more winning.

“You work hard for it,” he says. “I’m always trying to learn. There’s always a lot to improve on.”

Football, he says, became a taskmaster for and a vehicle to his ascent. He came to BYU, a school he had always felt a connection to, commencing when he was a youngster on Oahu, living in Laie, where BYU-Hawaii is located. He watched the Cougars on TV and became a fan. Eventually, in 1994, he played fullback for Edwards, who transformed into one of the biggest influences not just in Sitake’s career, but in his life.

“Everything about him seemed so perfect,” Sitake says. “He was about love. He empowered me, empowered everyone. The games were important to him, but not as important as the people. I just liked how I felt when I was around him. Kind of how I felt around my dad. It was natural, like he was supposed to be in my life.”

Sitake felt the love from his father, Tom, and from his coach, but both could be tough on him, too.

“Oh yeah, most people don’t know how tough LaVell could be,” he says. “He got mad plenty of times. Once, he kicked me and Justin Ena and Rob Morris out of practice for fighting. We got in a lot of fights back then. One time, as punishment, he made us walk around the field holding hands, while everyone else practiced.

“He finally asked me, ‘Why do you get in so many fights?’”

There was no good answer; Edwards knew that, Sitake knew it, too. That’s when the mentoring of the master to the student began in earnest. Edwards saw in Sitake, even when he was still playing, leadership qualities. As a team captain, Sitake met with Edwards every week, talking about subjects ranging from tactical strategies to player attitudes to ways to motivate and to be motivated. Sitake listened and learned.

“LaVell was really smart and I was kind of a nerd,” he says.

Edwards, a legend and a prophet, saw his pupil a bit differently.

“Kalani will make a great coach one day,” he told me.

So let it be spoken, so let it be done.

One trait Sitake so much admired about Edwards was his humility. During the fullback’s senior season, it became known that the longtime coach would retire. Sitake says Edwards kept apologizing to his seniors for taking the spotlight off of them, what with so much attention coming his way over that span.

“We were just honored to be going out with him,” Sitake says. “We loved him so much.”

After the final game of that season, when the stadium was officially named after Edwards, Sitake says the players were thrilled, and that the only one in the building surprised by the move was Edwards himself.

“The humility of the man,” says Sitake. “He was shocked. Can you imagine? He’d been here for 30 years, leading the program. And the expression on his face was that of amazement. What an example. In my mind, I took a snapshot of that. There was so much love, and I thought, ‘This is how you want people to think about you.’ It was so cool.”

Years later, when Sitake was hired as the Cougars’ head coach, after moving around as an assistant coach at places like Utah and Oregon State, he tried to remember all that Edwards had passed along to him. He rifled through books filled with handwritten notes taken at the foot of coaching mentors.

Every week, on Wednesday at 10 a.m., the new guy met up with the old at Edwards’ house in Provo. “We talked for about an hour, and almost none of it was about football,” Sitake says.

They discussed family, religion, parenting, leadership. “And how to love people,” he says. “How to follow Christ and how to be a good person. It was amazing.”

That initial season at the helm, Sitake, as he was riding the team bus to the stadium to play Toledo, noticed a voicemail left on his phone. The Cougars were 1-3 at the time and desperate for any positive indications moving forward. Sitake listened to the message. It was from Edwards, the man, the myth, the legend, who informed the new head coach that he was doing a “great job with everything.” It was like the pope administering a blessing.

“I needed to hear that,” Sitake says. “He saw something in me that I wasn’t even sure about myself. That’s LaVell.”

The Cougars ended up 9-4 that year. There were bumpier seasons ahead, but bit by bit Sitake grew into whatever it was that Edwards saw in him. Over the past two seasons, BYU’s win-loss record is 23-4, even as the Cougars transitioned into Big 12 play. Over the past six years, the record sits at 57-20, with four marks featuring double-digit wins. The last two seasons, BYU has knocked on the door of the College Football Playoff. And BYU is expected to have a strong 2026 run, having harvested some of the best talent the program has ever brought in. NIL benefits have helped, but a healthy culture has been built.

Back in 2016, that first year, as he tried to establish himself, Sitake, who is of Tongan descent and was born on that island, repeated again and again that he wanted to be the “Polynesian LaVell.” Then his phone rang.

“Kalani, this is LaVell. Stop saying that.”

Sitake: “No, I want to say it.”

Edwards: “Stop it. You can’t be me. Be you. Who you are is good enough.”

End of convo.

“It’s interesting because over the years, I’ve had to pivot, make tough decisions, go back and look at mistakes I’ve made, and adjust,” Sitake says. “I had to figure some things out.”

Edwards died the December following the conclusion of Sitake’s first season running BYU football. Sitake had lost his coach, in some ways, his compass, but he remembers even now what Edwards told and taught him — to trust himself, to build BYU football according to his vision for it.

Good advice.

Look at the head coaches Edwards influenced, Sitake points out — Mike Holmgren, Kyle Whittingham, Steve Sarkisian, Mike Leach, Andy Reid, among others. Including … yeah, BYU’s boss now.

“We all loved him,” Sitake says. “It’s cool to know that.”

So, he builds on.

In the midst of so much success, and with Penn State officials barreling down on him at the end of last season, asking him to come guide their football fortunes, Sitake recalled that Edwards, too, had a chance to leave Provo. The Detroit Lions offered him a lot of money, much more than what BYU was paying him, to lead that NFL team. He declined, and later said staying home was one of the smartest decisions he ever made. “I would have gotten myself fired there,” Edwards said.

Sitake gave the Nittany Lions’ offer a lot of thought. What coach wouldn’t have done that? Penn State is a legacy college football school, having suffered through one serious nadir, but also having climbed to great heights. Sitake figured he could win there, but he was already winning where he was.

In the back-and-forth, he finagled more money for his assistants and resources for his players, greater commitment from the administration, and a boost in pay for himself. As mentioned, the man is human. He wanted what he thought he deserved.

He got it.

“What’s the value of being where I’m at with the people I get to live and work with and learn from?” Sitake says. “If you want to put a price tag on that, I don’t know if you can. When you add it all up, you start realizing that, man, I think this is a no-brainer, but not necessarily in the way some people might think. From my perspective, it’s like, where can I get the most out of me? How can I help and serve and love others, and encourage others to do that? How can I encourage my team to do that? How can I be like LaVell?”

Basically, what Sitake wanted and wants is a place where he can recruit gifted athletes, coach them up to beat the snot out of opposing teams, and then love everyone in whatever color jersey they’re wearing, and all the fans, too.

Somebody once sang, “All you need is love.” Sitake’s version: All you need is love and the strength and fortitude and focus to put a righteous ass-whuppin’ on the other guys.

That realization, he says, has been “life changing for me.”

Sitake considers himself “blessed” to have a tight connection to the school, the coaches, players and fans attached to the program he grew up cheering for. “I have letters and notes from fans I just won’t throw away,” he says.

If you suspect that Sitake might be laying it on a little thick here, relishing “the love bombs,” as his wife calls so many of the positive interactions, that’s understandable. But when smack dab in the middle of this sit-down he hesitates for a moment and the plumbing in his eyes backs up, the Rainbirds go full throttle, tears flowing down his face, you have to conclude that even if Sitake was a good actor, he couldn’t conjure that.

He’s not Daniel Day-Lewis.

He’s Kalani Fifita-Sitake.

Make no mistake, the millions he’s awarded for his football services, his acumen and his presence are appreciated. But with that firmly in place, it’s the other stuff that pulls Sitake in.

“I don’t know why God blesses me with this opportunity to be here, to coach these players and be around amazing people,” he says. “Maybe my goal is to get these players to realize that they’re in it, they get to compete and play and it’s cool. Yeah, they get paid money, but if it’s just money they care about, that’s not going to work. That’s not the way life should be. You’re not supposed to care about money more than you care about other things. You’re supposed to care about people and love them. Your life is supposed to be a blessing to others.”

He gives his father a measure of credit for that way of thinking: “He used to frustrate me because we’d get ready to go somewhere, to a movie or something, we’d be driving and come across someone with a broken-down car. He’d always stop to ask if they needed help. If they did, he’d help them. We didn’t have much, but we had that; we had each other.”

After all that, what does it feel like to be a rich man now?

“What I realize,” he responds, “is that I’ve been rich my whole life, you know? My kids are growing up having more than I had at their age, but how can I give them the same lessons I got? You want to keep the cycle of learning going.

“My value is me as a person, not what I do or what I have.”

Sitake says he knows the benefits flow to some of his players these days, and he’s happy for them, but he wants them to dial in on not the “transactional,” but the “transformational.”

“That’s what we’re trying to do,” he says. “I think it’s working.”

He adds: “LaVell trusted his staff. He trusted his players. He had no problem giving autonomy. And I’m right there with him. I have a great staff, great players. … You want the right guys who are about the right things and you have to let go of guys who aren’t. But I don’t want anyone to go; I want them to learn.”

As for discipline, applying it to his players, Sitake says there’s nothing wrong with throwing down the thunder now and again: “There’s different ways to teach. There’s nothing wrong with being intense. But you have to think about what you’re doing, what we’re trying to get done here.”

That’s how he handles his players, tries to anyway — under control, the same when the team wins and when it loses.

“Don’t focus on the mistakes,” he says. “Focus on the solutions.”

It seems as though Kalani Sitake has found his solutions.

He knows, at 50, he’s only partway down the coaching road, the road of life, and that those endeavors are what Bagger Vance says golf is: “A game that can’t be won, only played.” Which is to say, at BYU, Tom Sitake’s son and LaVell Edwards’ protege hasn’t mastered all of it, but he’s getting pretty darn good at the pursuit.