Since joining the Big 12, BYU football has amped up its competition, creating not just a challenge that led to a 2-7 conference mark last season, but grading a road leading into the future entering a dark tunnel of uncertainty, a dark tunnel regarding how things are going to get any better.
BYU basketball entered that same tunnel, but found more light when Mark Pope’s team saw more success than anyone thought it would in its inaugural run through the country’s best college basketball league — until it lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. But the high beams went on with the most unexpected turn of events. Pope was offered the job at Kentucky and BYU hired rising NBA head coaching prospect Kevin Young, who came to the Cougars with the most lucrative coaching contract in BYU’s history. He’s making between $3 and $4 million annually.
You know what’s happened since. Young has turned BYU into a recruiting hot spot, landing future NBA lottery picks in a manner the Cougars have never done. Where’s the money and the pull coming from for such success? Two names: Ryan Smith, the billionaire, and Danny Ainge, the baller.
Young hasn’t coached a game yet, his team hasn’t won a game yet, but it appears that BYU basketball is doing what almost nobody thought it could. It’s launching itself onto the national stage and it’s blown past BYU football in doing so.
BYU football’s biggest opponent is no longer a school in the Big 12, it’s BYU basketball. And if things go the way they might with Young running the program and Smith backing it, Kalani Sitake will be feeling the comparative heat in a major way, especially if his team continues to bump and skid in mediocrity this next season, and in the seasons beyond.
With Young at the controls and the money of Smith adding to the NIL pot and the NBA influence of Ainge all in the mix, how in the world can BYU football keep up with that?
It can’t.
Well. It could, if the football equals of Young, Smith and Ainge came to the rescue.
Let’s see … who could that possibly be?
There’s really only one football name, a single name that blows the basketball trifecta clean out of the water by its lonesome. And you know who it is.
Big Red.
That’s right. Andy Reid is the best football coach on the planet. And he happened long ago to play and coach at … You-Know-Where. He loves BYU. It’s not only his alma mater, the place where he learned at the feet of the master, LaVell Edwards, but it’s the school owned and operated by his church. A man’s religion can connect him to a place in a way that can be inexplicable to anyone on the outside. it would take more than faith to pry a man of Reid’s repute and ability away from the world champion Kansas City Chiefs, a team that sits — perennially, as it turns out — at football’s highest elevation.
What Reid has done in Kansas City is remarkable, winning Vince Lombardi trophies like it’s a habit. He’s an innovative football mind who knows how to draw up creative plays on the board, knows how to inspire a defense, knows how to motivate athletes, athletes who have heard every coaching ploy ever spoken or screamed, by the shovelful. He’s driven, he’s prepared, he’s enlightened, he cares about his players, or at least makes his players believe he cares about them. He’s a leader of big, burly men who don’t just follow anyone. And, as mentioned, he leads them to championships.
What, then, would it take for Reid to climb down off his throne on the mountaintop and happily land five elevational levels below in Provo? What would it take for him to walk away from a quarterback like Patrick Mahomes and walk toward a quarterback like Jake Retzlaf?
Money?
Reid is currently under a new contract with the Chiefs for $100 million over five years, making him the highest-paid coach not just in football, but in all of American sports. He was making just $12 million annually — until he signed anew this offseason with the eight-mil-per-pop raise.
Which means BYU — and some combination of its boosters — would have to pay Reid … oh, I dunno … twice that amount to get him to coach the Cougars, along with guarantees for enough NIL money to properly recruit the kind of athletes he would need to win, and win big.
That might even be too rich for Smith, if he were a football guy instead of a basketball guy.
The one powerbroker who has billions tucked away in places he might not even know about, who could make it happen, who could give Reid what he wanted or call upon him to take what he was offered, who could give the players what they wanted, who could give the school multiple NCAA championships, who could give BYU fans the world, and who could give BYU football both a celestial path to winning and a huge profit is himself a prophet.
Russell Nelson and Andy Reid. Throw Steve Young’s name in, too, if you wanted.
Glory Hallelujah.
Lord only knows what those fellas could achieve together, if they joined forces, on God’s green, green, green turf.
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