or 27 on them before they came roaring back. Look at when they were one terrible two point conversion call away from winning with Taysom — there is plenty of evidence that BYU can hang and or beat Utah but Utah has been in BYU’s head, especially Kalani. Kalani gets noticeably stressed and looks way different during the Utah games. The “blinking” thing that people notice… ever realized it only happens when BYU is getting beat. It’s cause it’s a stress thing. When some people are under a ton of stress, their eye lids twitch — and the natural response to eye kid twitching is to blink.
I think Kalani is an inherently kind person and it’s not uncommon with inherently kind and salt of the earth type people to struggle with ego and power dynamics — it’s almost like these types are more interested in everyone being happy and having fun than your hyper competitive coaching personality types e.g. Gary Patterson, Whit, Saban, Meyer etc… there is a noticeable difference in the demeanor and approach with these types and the Kalani types. Generally speaking, football is an ego man’s sport in terms of head coaching and Kalani isn’t an ego guy.
Kalani has to accept that he can still be a good guy while being laser focused on beating Utah for those 60 minutes of play. It’s gotta be like two mma fighters who are friends outside the cage. They realize it’s gonna be a fight as they better bring it or else they will get thumped on by the other — Kalani must do what he can to adopt this kind of mentality.