Provo • Tom Holmoe didn’t want to jinx it.
When the internal rumblings started that Monday, Sept. 6, 2021, the BYU athletics director’s closest confidants began getting their hopes up. After so many near misses in the past, this time they felt a Big 12 invite could be imminent.
So cautiously, the small group started to prepare for what a potential announcement would look like.
“All we wanted was to get Tom ... to shoot a quick video putting on that [BYU] hat and say, ‘Welcome to the Big 12,’” associate athletics director David Almodova recalled.
Holmoe initially liked the idea, but a day later he said he wouldn’t do it. He’d been spurned before. He didn’t want to jinx it.
It wasn’t until a few days later that Holmoe finally felt ready.
“All right, let’s do this,” he told Almodova.
“When he said that, I was like, ‘Wow, this is happening.’ ...There was a lot of excitement,” Almodova recalled. “Because prior to that, it was always, ‘Will we be a P5 school? Does this ever happen?”
After all the fits and starts, near misses, and questions right down to the end, this week a dream becomes official. On Saturday, BYU officially joined the Big 12 conference along with Houston, UCF and Cincinnati. The Cougars are out of independence’s desert and on the national stage again.
“I feel like we’ve earned the invite,” Almodova said. “It feels like 50 years in the making.”
The near miss
Kalani Sitake boarded a plane headed for Dallas back in September 2016.
The Cougars’ head football coach joined other BYU senior officials, a key member of the contingent that would meet with the Big 12 and then-commissioner Bob Bowlsby. At that point, Bowlsby was considering expansion as a television deal awaited.
BYU, Houston and Cincinnati were considered top picks if the conference were to add.
“We all had our parts and we were going to pitch the school,” Sitake recalled recently. “On the flight down we were kind of divvying up who was going to say what. What were we going to hit with and the timing of it all? It was kind of cool to think, ‘Wow, this could happen.’”
The presentation BYU gave ended up being 90 pages of material. It highlighted BYU football’s wins — more than 300 of them — dating back to when LaVell Edwards roamed the sidelines.
The Cougars measured themselves against the rest of the Big 12 in terms of attendance. BYU would be third or fourth in attendance in football, officials said. It would be second in men’s basketball attendance, right behind Kansas.
And then Sitake carried the human element of the presentation. He talked about growing up around BYU and playing for Edwards during the ‘90s. He spoke to the unique niche the Provo-based school would bring.
“I was able to speak as a fan and former player for LaVell Edwards,” Sitake said. “I felt an incredible honor like, ‘Oh my gosh I get to do this.’ I hadn’t even been a head coach long and this is really cool.”
When the contingent left Dallas, everyone felt good. Nearly a dozen schools made the pitch in person, ESPN reported. There were few Texas schools, including SMU, Rice and Houston. The out-of-state candidates included UCF, Cincinnati, Tulane and South Florida.
“I mean, we were right there,” Almodova remembered. “We knew that if a conference was going to expand, and if it was the Big 12, we felt like we were one of the schools that would be selected.”
But a month later, Bowlsby backed away from the table. The Big 12 didn’t expand and BYU was left to football independence
The athletic department knew when they elected to break away from the Mountain West in 2011, this was the risk they would have: indefinite purgatory.
But this rejection hurt.
“I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t know the reasons why we didn’t get in,” Almodova said. “I have my thoughts. But I think the timing of it as an institution and the university, I think it opened up some things that we needed to work on internally.”
At the time people speculated that it was because of location. BYU was located more 1,000 miles away from the heartland of the conference in Texas.
There was also public scrutiny of BYU’s stance on LGBTQ+ issues. Iowa State’s student government issued a statement at the time saying BYU’s policies were, “inconsistent with the values of the Big 12.”
The Big 12 never commented on the issue and Bowlsby didn’t comment on his lack of expansion. It left BYU with at least six more years without a conference.
“We needed to make them certain in the next six years that we were fully ready,” Almodova said. “We knew that there was going to come a time when new TV contracts would be discussed.”
BYU quarterback Sol-Jay Maiava-Peters (10) cheers as the team takes the field before an NCAA college football game against Arizona Saturday, Sept. 4, 2021, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/David Becker)
Texas and OU leave
The bombshell that BYU had been banking on came in July 2021, when Texas and Oklahoma announced they would leave the Big 12 for the SEC.
Immediately, it became clear that Bowlsby needed to make a move to replace his two marquee members. And the chances that he would look to BYU, a former Big 12 candidate, seemed inevitable.
Internally, athletic department staffers immediately looked to its first game against Arizona in Las Vegas as a showcase to the Big 12.
BYU had one of the first games of the college football season on a neutral site. It would be, they figured, the chance to show to Bowlsby what BYU could bring.
“We kind of looked at it and said, ‘Hey, this is a home game for us.’ Even though it wasn’t, we told our staff internally, ‘This is home game. We’re taking everyone down there to put on an event,’ ” Almodova said.
Up to that point, BYU felt it had all the momentum that it lacked the first time. It was coming off of a 2020 season where it had just won 11 games. Quarterback Zach Wilson had just been drafted No. 2 overall by the New York Jets. Since 2016, the athletic department had added around 60 to 70 staffers to make it on the level of a Power Five.
And when they went down to Las Vegas, the department held a fan festival on Friday night where thousands of people showed up. The ticket sales for BYU fans were estimated to be around 40,000.
“We knew what a great opportunity we had playing Arizona in Vegas,” Almodova said. “I think people could kind of sense and feel that vibe of, ‘Man, is this happening.’”
Meanwhile, BYU staffers updated the presentation from 2016 with more numbers. It got up to 120 pages. But they never gave it.
Bowlsby called after the Arizona game and the invite was extended.
Many of the problems that were publicly stated the first time didn’t come up, including the concerns about LGBTQ+ rights on campus.
“We came back after 2016 and said, ‘We are in a good spot,’” Holmoe said in 2022. “But between [then] and the time we do have another opportunity, we have to get great in a number of areas.
“One of the areas would be socially. We have done a number of things to address it. We still have a lot of work to do in LGBTQ. Not necessarily in athletics, but in communication and the schools and teams that play us. … And when the Big 12 call came, we asked the question, ‘What can we do to help you in any of these questions?’ And they said, ‘No, we are ready to go.’”
The future
When Sitake talks about LaVell Edwards, it is usually reverential. He was his captain when he played and was a fan long before it.
Edwards won a national championship in 1984 and took home more than 250 wins in his career. He transformed BYU into the air raid-style offense that captured a national audience.
In many ways, the foundation of BYU going to the Big 12 was laid by him. It was the reason, when BYU went independent 12 years ago, it felt it had the notoriety to survive independence. That it wouldn’t just be permanent purgatory.
And even as the years and opportunities passed, BYU was guided by the days of Edwards and the feeling it belonged back on the national stage.
“I don’t know about doubt, unknown for sure,” Almodova said. “This is 50 years worth of what we’ve accomplished and it all started with Coach Edwards. And I think that’s what we were looking at, like the full body of work. It wasn’t just a couple of years. It was all these years before this time, so I think it played a big factor.”
The Cougars still have work to do to win at this level. Sitake will need more resources and staffers. Even as football salaries are going up (new defensive coordinator Jay Hill is making more $1 million, sources said) the Cougars still lag behind some of their competition in spending.
But for the first time in over a decade, BYU has a conference to call home.