Inside the culture fueling BYU football’s perfect start under Kalani Sitake

The Cougars’ winning streak might actually be about more than just talent.

One by one, the BYU Cougars uttered the words in the postgame of their eighth-straight victory that coaches of stellar teams love to hear, that coaches of mediocre teams hear but don’t believe, that envious coaches of bad teams wish they’d hear, and that casual fans hear but aren’t completely sure how much they really matter.

Well. They do matter.

And anyone who has closely watched BYU football this season is fully aware that the important words mixed as they must be — in a blend of talent and toughness and togetherness — make for the winning that the Cougars are now creating for themselves.

“Culture. Unity. Brotherhood. Trust.”

Spoken against the wrong backdrop, into stale air, those terms become a cheap cliche, a parody of themselves, eliciting a roll of the eyes and a gag in the throat. But when they ring true, when they are made to ring true, they transform into a power that can take a team to places not even the team itself initially thought possible.

Although all the players jumped in on this theme, and Kalani Sitake, too, it was senior defensive end Logan Lutui who gave extra utterance and oomph to that power after BYU’s win over Iowa State on Saturday. In three sentences, he said: “We’re a team that knows how to win. It comes back to our culture, to our brotherhood, to the unity that we have. No matter what happens, we know we can trust each other.”

After the way the Cougars came back in that difficult road game, seeming to fall apart early, trailing, as they have in previous games by two touchdowns, and firing back to spin their fate around from the negative to the positive, there was nothing cheap about what Lutui said.

He spoke truth.

And the Cougars are undefeated on account of it.

As mentioned, they have talent, all right, and toughness and togetherness, as well. But perhaps not enough of the former, not without a whole lot of the latter, to get this thing to where it is now — atop the Big 12 without having tasted the bitterness of defeat.

Bear Bachmeier has been nothing short of remarkable. For a freshman to come in and play the single most important position on the field and off it, to generate the kind of reliability and relentlessness he has earned from and shared with his teammates is most unusual.

Evidence of that has come in every game, in increasing amounts, and it certainly was on display in Ames against the Cyclones, when he brought the Cougars back from defeat’s door with his calm demeanor, with his passing and running, not just tossing two touchdown passes and rushing for another, but in everything he did leading up to those scores.

More evidence came the week before, against Utah, when Bachmeier made his way into the end zone from 22 yards out, dodging tacklers and at the end forcing his way across the goal line with an entourage of his offensive linemen pushing him from behind. If that wasn’t a combo pack of an astounding individual effort blended with a team effort, not sure what would be.

What came immediately thereafter was equally and especially telling. When Bachmeier was pulled to his feet by his teammates, the ball still in his hands, he extended his arm, offering the ball to one of his linemen. What did the lineman do? He handed the ball back to his quarterback in an ultimate expression of respect.

In that moment, whether you were a Cougar or a Ute, that was pretty darn cool. It was more than cool; it was indicative of what’s happening inside of BYU football.

Sitake gets a lot of the credit for creating such a vibe, and he should. He preaches at nearly every turn football family first. But without the players’ skill and sincerity, it would be a nice little story. With it, the story has grown bigger than just that.

Nobody knows what will happen in the remaining games, although BYU’s players keep saying they know they’re going to win. Most of us outsiders are not so sure about that. But we don’t matter. What’s going on with this team is caroming around inside its inner sanctums, and, from there, it reveals itself for a few hours on Saturdays. The winning underscores and accentuates the competitive effectiveness of it.

Whether the Cougars keep winning or they lose somewhere along the way, the four words they’ve embraced are bound to do one sure thing — bring out the best in them. That’s both cool and proof that expressions sometimes uttered without the truth behind them, words that might sound hackneyed or trite, are anything but when the truth accompanies them.