The man who was the head coach at BYU for 11 years, years filled with weird quotes, strange verbiage, unique tactics, scriptural analogies, awkward demeanor, quests for perfection, bands of brothers, unrealistic aims at national championships, principles of modern management, honor, spirit, tradition, and, most importantly, wins, takes the wheel now at Utah State, of all places.
Since we saw him last, Bronco Mendenhall caromed through coaching stints at Virginia, a two-year hiatus, and New Mexico. Yeah, now, he’s in Logan.
And the folks in Cache Valley are thrilled to have him.
Why? Because he knows how to resurrect dead programs.
He took over at BYU after Gary Crowton 86’ed the Cougars, at Virginia after football there became a mere afterthought to basketball, and at New Mexico after the Lobos skidded into a ditch. And he made them all better than they were.
For all his quirks, and there are plenty of them, it turns out Mendenhall really can coach football. He’s good at it. He always had acumen, he had ample brain power, but he also had lessons to learn from here to there. And learn them he did. All told, he has 140 wins against 88 losses. And significant in modern college football, especially as it pertains to recruiting, he’s sent some 60 players to sign NFL contracts.
Utah State has forever drawn in good athletes. Just not enough of them.
Over the past number of years, the Aggies have struggled on the field and off it, losing more games than they wanted, having more character issues among some of its players than any institution of higher learning prefers.
(Butch Dill | AP) New Mexico head coach Bronco Mendenhall reacts after a play during the first half of an NCAA college football game, against Auburn, Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024, in Auburn, Ala.
Unless he’s suddenly forgotten and abandoned everything he’s absorbed, everything he’s emphasized for a couple of decades now, Mendenhall is the right coach for the coming challenge.
And “unique” challenges are what he’s said he’s craved, and based on the evidence at hand, what he’s also been able to master.
For all his years in coaching, from the time he spent as a defensive coordinator, back when he wore a T-shirt and shorts to offseason workouts in freezing temperatures to prove some sort of point to his namby-pamby players; to back before that, when he lived in his office … no, really, he slept there, showered there, worked there, bummed rides off his colleagues from there, having parked his car on campus somewhere and forgotten where he parked it and thereafter reported it stolen, for the cops to have found it exactly where he’d parked it months earlier; to replacing Crowton in the captain’s chair; to winning a couple of conference titles and qualifying for 11 straight bowl games; to making a habit of using clunky terms like stewardship and accountability and pride cycle and higher level of execution; to wanting to erase players’ names off the backs of BYU’s uniforms and replacing them with Honor, Spirit and Tradition; to comparing his players to the Stripling Warriors, young fierce characters in the Book of Mormon, Mendenhall insisted on his players, as far as he knew anyway, being of high character and working hard at “position mastery.”
Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune Brigham Young Cougars head coach Bronco Mendenhall on the sidelines near the end of the game, as BYU was trailing Utah 20-13, at Lavell Edwards Stadium, Saturday, September 21, 2013.
He was as demanding as he was, at times, impersonal, requiring his players to attend church devotionals the night before games, and disciplining them for stepping out of line.
When two of his players got thrown in jail for kicking down apartment doors in search of someone who was chucking water balloons at one of their girlfriends, Mendenhall said:
“I view the action that our two young men did as a program failure, which is reflective on me. I need to arm them with the knowledge base and the motivation and education to be consistent, regardless of circumstances. What I presented to our team is, when anyone fails, it’s reflective on all of us, and I take the most responsibility.”
I mean, what football coach talks like that? One — You-Know-Who. The message to his players was clear enough, though. Clean up your act and be grown men. Oh, and practice and play hard for me and for your teammates.
He did the same at Virginia, without so much of the religious element, building his version of team culture Bronco-style.
Former Cavs quarterback Bryce Perkins once said this about his coach: “Thinking about all the years coach Mendenhall has been here, and I was here for two of them, every year the unbroken growth of this team and this spirit and the bond with this team is unmatched — the relations we’ve built. You can see it on the field just how hard we fight for each other.”
Bronco sometimes made mistakes in handling players, who to start, who to sit, often favoring gritty walk-ons over more talented star recruits, but he did know how to motivate and cultivate the aforementioned team attitude and atmosphere. He had his quirks and contradictions, saying stuff like he didn’t care so much about the money he was paid, but then bolting from BYU to Virginia, in part at least because the Cavs were more than doubling his annual salary up past $3 million, which was a decent contract back then. He wore some folks thin at BYU with his Bronco-isms, but when he left Provo, he stirred his success at Virginia.
An educated guess now says he’ll conjure success at USU, too. More than it’s had in recent years. So it seems a good hire for the Aggies.
And, in all honesty, we in the media have kind of missed him around here, peculiarities, oddities, eccentricities and all. New Mexico’s loss, then, is Utah State’s gain, mostly because the Aggies know too well that losing hurts even worse than winning feels good. But they’ll take Bronco’s brand of and approach to winning and be happy with it.
