The only time I said in my original post that the coaches didn't care I said, "While the fans and recruits cared about the rivalry, the coaches didn't." I don't get how you turned that into, "The coaches don't care about winning." I never said that.

My original post is all about the rivalry and how the players I knew viewed how much the coaches valued it compared to the fans and even some of the players themselves. It wasn't about every other game during the season. My point was, and still is, that the rivalry game against Utah was no different to the coaches than any other game on the schedule, and we've paid for that attitude the last 10 years, and even some of the players viewed it that way. Bronco himself has said numerous times that the Utah game was no more important to him than any other game. And like I said before, Bronco never played in the rivalry. He hated BYU during his college years playing at Oregon State.

I never said Bronco or any of the coaches didn't care about winning. As a coach it's his job to win football games. I'm sure he wanted to win the Utah game just as much as any other game on the schedule, or in your words 110%. There's just one problem: Whitt wanted to win 150%. He prepared more, he game planned more. That game meant more to Whitt than it ever did to Bronco, and the results bear this out.

You talk about all the former players that were on the coaching staff that played in the rivalry and that because of that it did mean something to them and they understood what the game meant. Okay, well first of all, the head coach never played in it, and he clearly didn't understand it. Last time I checked he set the tone for the rest of the coaching staff and what they should do. Second, if they did care that much, they had a really funny way of showing it. The players I worked with certainly seemed think that the coaches were still stuck at 110% while Utah was at 150%. If they truly understood the game like you say they did, then they would have realized that they had to match Utah's 150%, but they never did.