The church has not shown a willingness to be competitive and quite frankly it’s insane how college sports operate now. BYU has been dying a slow death as you clearly described.

When I was a kid I lived for BYU sports. I’d wear nothing but BYU t-shirts to school and our family gave up our season football tickets of 35 years last season.

Just find other stuff to do. Utah is such a great state and though I hate advocating for more people to go out and recreate, it’s much more fun and healthy than being a die hard of a dying program. You can always come back, but you owe them nothing, and until or if it ever improves I’ve mostly moved on. I keep one finger on the pulse just to be sure though.