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It's time for BYU to hate that team |
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A_King | Friday, March 10, 2006, 7:56 pm
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Aaron King
COUGARBLUE
I'm having painful flashbacks. I'm sure you are too.
Why do the Utes have this power to crush Cougar nation even though they fell to 6-25 TCU ten days ago? Because they hate BYU and they thrive off those bitter feelings in this rivalry.
I'm sure I don't even have to begin to explain my reasoning. You guys saw it, I saw it. The Ute fans loved it.
I hate it. We all hate it. But these Cougars don't hate it enough.
In the past, the Cougars have said when talking about games against the Utes, "We're just going to treat it like any other game."
During a radio interview earlier this week senior Brock Reichner said it, and look how his game went: played 26 minutes and had zero points.
Treating this rivalry game like "any other game" is a mistake and we continue to pay for it.
Yet, for the Utes it is unlike any other game.
It is the game for them to hang their metaphorical hat on. It is the game for them to forget their previous woes and troubles. It is the game that keeps their coaches employed. It is the game that makes them laugh and puff their chests and fill the Utah radio waves with renewed wishy-washy pride.
All Cougar fans hear after these games are those laughs. And it's that kind of laughter that makes a fan forget about a 100-90 victory over regular season champion San Diego.
This form of derision has fueled the rivalry for the fans, but has yet to light a fire under these Cougar players.
Coaches: no more mild philosophies when it comes to this rivalry
It's time to stop being the "big man" and start treating the Utes as what they are.
They are enemies.
They destroy great years of basketball. They embarrass talented football teams. They haunt our sports world and do so the whole time using pejorative phrases when referring to us and quite literally urinate on everything the BYU Cougars stand for. They give us zero respect on and off the playing arena and yet, when we get a chance to truly pay them back for their actions we take what some may call the "high road" and treat them like any other team. Instead of with equaled bitterness and passion.
This needs to stop.
If our Cougars continue to arrive for rivalry games with the mindset of, "let's do what we can to beat them and see if they let us" then we are going to lose over and over again in both football and basketball.
The Utes passion of hate is what has them cheering tonight.
The Cougars need to take up on hate, because if our players had that same sort of passion in this rivalry we would never have to go home early from a tournament or watch our football players receive their senior blankets on our own field to the sounds of the Ute fight song.
It goes against all rhyme or reason, even our religion, but what we need is hate.
Aaron King can be reached at
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