but I do believe he wanted to retire a few years earlier than he did.

The rules of the game started to change subtly in the late 80's and early 90's. The BCS became the initial codification of this shift and change. BYU is not willing to play by those rules, and part of that decision is because there is in no small part aspects of highly competitive money making college sports (football and mens basketball) that is beyond unseemly and moved into immoral. Until either the system implodes and there is a cultural change in enough pocketbooks- this is BYU's reality. Why is women's soccer and women's volleyball doing so well- because those sports are more similar to how college football was in the 1970's than what college football is today. In those days football made far more money and had far more notoriety than college volleyball but there was not the arms race of today and the enormous budget differences between the haves and have nots. In other words the money BYU spends on women's volleyball is not enormously different than what Stanford spends today. As long as Stanford's budget for women's volleyball is not viewed as unseemly and immoral by BYU decision makers and the LDS US population at large, my prediction is BYU will compete well with Stanford. If the day comes that women's volleyball gets super popular with the US population at large and there becomes the incremental growth of an arms race- BYU will then be on a trajectory to mediocrity. It is just the way it is going to be. The institutional commitments that BYU admin needs to make will not be made.

My advice is to enjoy women's volleyball and keep the VHS tapes of the glory days in football handy.

I felt like a lone man in 2015 when I thought BYU had a pretty good year and there were vocal voices unhappy with Bronco Mendenhall for losing to Utah again. BYU should lose to Utah.