responsibilities.
Their teams had the responsibility to not suck, but they didn't bear it up. BYU had achieved long term national prominence. The rest of the conference had a duty to be good, too. If they would have been a conference of consistently ranked teams with earning an occasional national award here or there, BYU would have stayed. The reality is that the conference reputation was anemic at best after TCU and UU left. There were no other teams in the conference to pull their fair share of the "respect" burden, and BYU felt obligated to keep up their own level of success that they had earned over the years.
Who screwed whom?