The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (28 page)

But that same day Whittingham got offered the head job at Utah. Urban Meyer had announced he was heading to Florida to become its new head coach right after Utah played in the Fiesta Bowl. Whittingham had been chosen as his successor.

Whittingham felt torn. “Anytime you are talking about your alma mater, there is a pull and a certain allure to that,” he said. “There was so much to the decision—bitter rivals; same conference; same state. That’s why it was such a gut-wrenching experience.”

After days of mulling it over, Whittingham called Holmoe and told him he was coming to BYU. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the relationship he had formed with his players. Plus, he and his family were firmly entrenched at Utah. “For my wife it was: ‘Why are you even thinking about this? It’s Utah.’ ”

Persuaded, Whittingham called Holmoe back and told him he had changed his mind: he was remaining at Utah.

Later that night, the phone rang at Bronco Mendenhall’s home. It was Holmoe. He asked how Mendenhall was doing. Mendenhall said he and his family were packing.

“Not so fast,” Holmoe told him.

On December 8, 2004, Utah announced Kyle Whittingham as its new head coach. That same day, Bronco Mendenhall trudged into his job interview with Tom Holmoe and a number of other BYU administrators. He went in with a chip on his shoulder.

“I only came to BYU for one reason, and that was to help a friend—Gary Crowton,” Mendenhall said. “And I saw the relationship between him and the athletic department leadership as adversarial. So all of those feelings were pretty raw when I went in. I was defending Gary.”

An introvert by nature, Mendenhall was tight-lipped throughout the interview. It left a poor impression on Holmoe.

“He wouldn’t say anything,” Holmoe said. “He was so loyal to Gary because Gary had hired him. I was trying to draw out of him a vision for the program. I asked what things he would do differently and how he would make it better. He said he didn’t think there was much that could be done to make it better. I was like, you gotta be kidding me.”

By the time the interview ended, Holmoe had decided to pursue other candidates, and Mendenhall didn’t care.

But when BYU players got wind that other candidates were being considered, a bunch of them went to see Holmoe. “About twenty-five guys came into my office to tell me—plead with me—‘Please let it be Bronco,’ ” Holmoe said. “They were all defensive players, not one offensive player.”

It was the kind of input Holmoe couldn’t ignore. At the same time,
BYU’s president privately reached out to Gary Crowton and asked for his recommendation. He made a case for Mendenhall. “I recommended Bronco because he would be very disciplined in exercising what he felt was right,” Crowton said. “There is no gray with Bronco. It’s black-and-white.”

Under the circumstances, that was music to the ears of the top brass at the university. On December 13, BYU introduced thirty-eight-year-old Mendenhall as its new coach, making him the second-youngest head coach in Division I football.

In his first full day on the job, Mendenhall arrived at his office before 5:00 a.m. No one was around. Mendenhall had tossed and turned all night, unable to stop thinking about the task ahead. He looked around his new office. The walls were bare. The top of his desk had lists of recruits. There was a couch with Nike gear on it. A pile of messages was next to the phone. He started making a to-do list. An hour later he was still writing. There was so much to do he didn’t know where to start. Hire assistant coaches? Meet with the team? Call recruits?

All of a sudden he felt as if he were in over his head. He knew football. He knew BYU’s strict honor code. But he didn’t know how to meld the two in a way that would return the program to the national prominence it had achieved under LaVell Edwards. Worse, he had no one to turn to for advice.

Desperate, he knelt beside the couch and prayed. “I needed help, and I was seeking guidance,” Mendenhall said.

His quiet prayer eventually transitioned to prolonged, silent meditation. He lost track of time until he was stirred by a knock on the door. He checked his watch; it was nearly 8:00 a.m. He opened the door and discovered LaVell Edwards.

“I had a feeling you’d be here early,” Edwards said in his signature raspy voice. “I just came by to wish you luck.”

Mendenhall was speechless. He hardly knew Edwards. But he revered him.

“Please come in,” Mendenhall said.

Nursing a bum knee, the seventy-four-year-old legend limped toward a chair and took a seat opposite Mendenhall. Then he just stared at the young coach. Mendenhall met his gaze.

“You’ve got a tough job,” Edwards finally said.

“I just realized that over the past two hours.”

Edwards grinned. He knew Mendenhall hadn’t even begun to realize how tough it would be. “You’ve got one of the hardest jobs in the country,” Edwards continued.

Sober, Mendenhall nodded.

“But you’ve also got one of the best jobs in the country,” Edwards said.

For the next thirty minutes, Mendenhall listened as Edwards shared ideas. When it was clear that the visit was coming to an end, Mendenhall asked if he had any parting advice.

“Don’t try to be me,” Edwards said. “Don’t try to be anybody else, either. The best way to success is be yourself. Just be yourself and set your program in that direction.”

Then he disappeared.

That afternoon Mendenhall called a team meeting. In no uncertain terms, he let everybody know that the game at BYU was about to change. Players would be expected to meet an exceptionally high performance standard on the field—unparalleled conditioning and exceptional technique—and an even higher standard off the field. No aspect of the honor code would be optional.

At the end of the meeting, three players trailed him to his office and announced they were quitting the team. The following day three more players quit. That only emboldened Mendenhall. Over the first ten days of his tenure he came up with a five-point mission statement for himself. He listed the points in order of priority:

None of these were expectations placed on him by the university. Mendenhall came up with these on his own. The first four were based on his reading of BYU’s handbook and the university’s instructions to faculty and staff. “I considered myself an employee of the institution,” Mendenhall said. “I figured if those objectives applied to everyone that teaches and works at this university, they probably ought to apply to me, too.”

The fifth one—finishing in the top twenty-five—was Mendenhall’s self-imposed goal for greatness on the field.

Then he told his staff that he wanted to change the profile of their recruits. “National-championship-caliber athletes that are exceptional students
and who are either Mormons or who want to live the Mormon standards,” Mendenhall said. “That is what we want. Otherwise you should not play football at BYU.”

To ensure they were recruiting student-athletes who fit the mold of a faith-based institution, Mendenhall also told his coaches that he wanted them to use new recruiting protocols:

There was one other thing. Mendenhall wanted recruiters to be much more explicit about the honor code when making in-home visits to recruits, especially when visiting homes of non-Mormon athletes who had little or no familiarity with the church’s teachings. “They don’t have to believe what Mormons believe,” Mendenhall said. “But they need to know that Christian values are expected to be lived on our campus.”

Some of his assistants thought he was crazy. “Nobody is going to come here,” one of them said.

Others agreed.

But Mendenhall had a different perspective. “I don’t want these kids to come and not know what they are getting into,” he said. “If you don’t acknowledge and aren’t pretty clear about what they are getting into here, I think it borders on exploitation for the sake of playing a game. I’ve seen young men make mistakes and come and go here. And I don’t want that to ever happen again.”

The changes in recruiting tactics had an instant impact. The year before Mendenhall took over, BYU pursued 1,000 recruits. In Mendenhall’s first season, BYU recruited just 125 players. A fraction of them received a scholarship. The culture of the team changed overnight. Its record improved pretty fast, too. In Mendenhall’s first season, BYU finished 6-6. The next year BYU opened the 2006 season by losing the first two games. Then the Cougars ripped off ten straight wins to close out the season 11-2. Along the
way they knocked off fifteenth-ranked TCU in Fort Worth and hammered Oregon 38–8 in a bowl game. In 2007, BYU went 11-2 again, going on another ten-game winning streak that included a bowl victory over UCLA.

After back-to-back eleven-win seasons and three straight trips to a bowl game, Mendenhall wasn’t hearing any complaints from coaches or anyone else about his system. BYU was winning. The stadium was full. The university administration was thrilled, and Mormon Church officials were undoubtedly relieved. Those embarrassing headlines were long gone. Most important to Mendenhall, though, his players were thriving on and off the field.