My Favorite BYU Games - Honorable Mention Category

-- Making lists + BYU Football = match made in blog heaven

There are big games. Dramatic games. Fun games. And then there are your favorite games -- these are personal. Over the next week I will list the BYU games that mattered most to me and explain why. In the majority of cases, BYU's "biggest" games from a national or historic perspective will in fact intersect with my favorites -- how could they not? -- but there may be a few surprises peppered throughout. In today's post I will outline the five honorable mentions that just failed to make the official list. Tomorrow we'll cover games 1 through 15 in my personal pantheon. 

One note worth keeping in mind -- I only include games I've been an 'alive' fan for, which means games from 1995 and prior will not be included. 

BYU at Washington, 2008
Look, we didn’t know ok? When BYU blocked that extra point to stuff Washington all we knew is that BYU had beaten a Pac-10 team on the road, and that this Pac-10 team had a potential number one draft pick at quarterback. Victory in such a dramatic fashion was a huge deal! Our offensive talent looked as good as we’d hoped after a year of offseason development. Our QB (Hall) was better than their projected number one pick; our RB (Unga), TE (Pitta), and WR (Collie) were all better than their Huskie counterparts. So forgive us for celebrating. We didn’t know that Washington was beginning to crap out their worst season ever, an 0-12 toilet clogger. We were happy, and I was especially happy. Washington dissed us in 1984 and messed up our dream season in 1996. This game was personal and victory was celebrated accordingly.


BYU at Nebraska, 2015
Can a game that features a season-ending injury to a beloved player qualify as a favorite? This one came close despite the painful loss of #4. I don't know how to feel about this game now, and I didn't then either. Here's what I wrote in my sappy tribute to Taysom Hill the next day:

"What I went through on Saturday was unlike anything sports viewership had ever brought me. I was down, then up, down then up, then really really down, then higher up than I'd ever been. And then, one tweet later, I was dead. Hill was done for the season. Again.

And yet we had won the game! In miracle fashion! We were college football darlings for a weekend. Terren Houk had surpassed Riley Nelson's famous referee high five. I didn't know what to feel. Taysom Hill had once again left me in sports shock -- only this time in the sad way."

As much as I loved the hail mary ending, whenever I picture this game I can’t help but feel a minor degree of sadness wondering what level of Taysom domination we may have witnessed if he was healthy for the 2015 season. That's just enough to keep this one among the honorable category. 


BYU vs ASU, 2021
This game featured an all-time crowd performance generating legendary false starts. Two teams in the top-25. A fourth-down, stumbling, TD heave to Isaac Rex from a backup QB to seal the win. A Wilgar-Tooley knockout-interception combo which would’ve been the highlight on a normal day. A flea-flicker for a 35-yard touchdown. Oh and did I mention the win over ASU validated the prior week’s streak-snapper over Utah? This game was a freaking blast and I haven’t even mentioned the one play we’ll remember forever: THE PUNCH. What a game. 

BYU at Houston, 2020
The signs of Zach Wilson’s excellence were available to all who looked: he graduated early from high school so he could participate in spring ball; practice reports detailing his swagger and skill were all the rage; older plays on the team praised him; media reported on his love of watching film; and most indicative of his future he took two girls to prom -- and they were college cheerleaders. We never should have doubted.

But after a 2019 that featured some highs (Tenn, USC) offset by some brutal duds (Utah, Hawaii) there were some folk who wanted Baylor Romney.

Baylor Romney. A QB who to that point in his career had completed 25 passes in 16 non-garbage time drives.

Let the record show I was not one of these bozos.

 

The day after I posted "I'm all in" on Zach BYU trounced Army 55 to 3. But that wasn’t my favorite game of 2020.

The first play for BYU’s offense against Houston was the famous Milne touchdown bomb but after that BYU went cold. BYU eventually found themselves down by 12 with a minute left in the third quarter. Yet for some reason I didn't doubt a comeback. Here’s what I wrote the next day, in a post titled, "Zach Wilson is Making Me Feel Stuff":

"We'd mustered a measly 14 points through three-fourths of the game. In my mind I knew the odds were against us: we'd have to score basically as many points in 15 minutes as we had in the first 45 just to get even with Houston, let alone what we'd need to do if Houston continued to score. I should have been panicking that our perfect season was about to get torched. I should have had that queasy feeling that accompanies every first loss of the season.

But I didn't. I believed Zach would make something happen. And when I realized that, I began to remember a BYU quarterback hadn't made me feel that way in a long, long time."

There is something so fun and special about having a player on your team who is so good that you are forced to believe even when all evidence suggests you shouldn't. Zach gave me that hope, and rewarded it with one of the prettiest touchdown passes in recent Cougar memory and kept the perfect season alive. 


BYU vs USC 2019
This game was awesome – a back-and-forth affair with a tremendous crowd and an overtime walk-off interception to boot. Three things hold it back from making my list. 

1) It was an afternoon game, meaning I was teaching my daughter how to ride her bike during the majority of this game. I hate afternoon games. 

2) The long referee review of the Dayan pick in overtime took away a teeny bit of the “walk off” excitement.

3) I should have been at the game, but turned down a free ticket due to mental health issues I was fighting at the time. 

Man I wish the refs, my broken brain, and the time slot could all have a redo on this one.