One more thing about BYU-Utah

Not to bring up bad memories for anyone, but I had one more thought on this BYU-Utah rivalry business. Gordon Monson wrote the other day after the Utah demolished the Cougars:

For the most part, Utah goes about its business, winning games. BYU talks about its lofty goals of national championships and national exposure, comparing itself to Notre Dame, and then, more than once or twice or thrice, embarrasses itself with its stumbling and bumbling, its lack of preparation, its lack of execution, its lack of proper coaching.

The title of his piece was "Utah Football is Better than BYU and Its Not Even Close." At first, I disagreed with this because the records of BYU and Utah are nearly identical over the past decade. I came to agree, though, that Utah has felt more successful. Why is that? Part of it is that Utah's best seasons have been much better than BYU's best seasons (2004, 2009). But most of it has to do with expectations. The expectations of BYU are always so unbelievably high they inevitably come up short (this is the same reason why a 10-2 record here at Ohio State always feels like a complete failure). Before any games are played, BYU fans anoint themselves "BCS busters" and then inevitably end up playing in the Las Vegas bowl. Utah almost always seems to play under the radar, no matter how successful they've been in the past. Given this, it seems that Utah is more successful than BYU, even though both teams have roughly similar records.

By the way, I think this craving for positive exposure is, in part, formed by BYU's relationship to the LDS Church. We Mormons also seem to crave positive PR. We want people to think we are not weird. We want to be popular in sometimes unbecoming ways. The exposure-craving nature of BYU, then, is partly a product of the same impulse in the larger LDS community.