LaVell coached 29 years and only once, 3 years before he retired, did he make it to a NY6 bowl game. During his career, we had lots of 8-5-type seasons; in fact, 13 times we finished with 8 or fewer victories. And our schedules back then were much weaker than what we're used to today. Even the 1984 season was misleading; most of the teams we beat had losing seasons, we played in a minor bowl game against a very mediocre 6-5 Michigan team, and after we barely won, no one in the country, including us, thought we were anywhere near being the nation's best team. We had many ignominious defeats and embarrassments, and we usually lost those those minor bowl games we always played in.

And, believe it or not, LaVell himself made many a bad coaching mistake over the years, and some of the worst of them came in the biggest games. Did you know that as a head coach, he never once wore a headset on the sidelines?

All I'm saying is that your experience now is by no means worse than the experience we old-timers had rooting for BYU under LaVell Edwards, or Crowton or Mendenhall. The reasons we rooted for BYU were not dependent on unbroken success. Young people who only support a team that's currently winning the highest percentage of its games aren't the kind of fans you're addressing in this post. We old folks, no matter how young we were, wouldn't have switched loyalties even if the teams up north went unbeaten ten years in a row.