Wildcats on rise, hungrier for win

"Two words: Tedy Bruschi."

Then the coup de grace: "You just wait until basketball season starts."

For die-hard Wildcats fans, the team’s 10-year absence from bowl competition has been as harsh as the drought on the Colorado River. So when the Wildcats take on No. 17 Brigham Young in Saturday’s Las Vegas Bowl, Cougars boosters shouldn’t expect a lot of chest thumping from the several thousand fans clad in cardinal and navy.

Instead, the Arizona faithful are savoring their first sniff of the postseason since 1998. There’s no sense of entitlement on our sideline. We’re just happy and relieved to finally be playing football at Christmastime.

It didn’t used to be this way. For most of the ’90s, Arizona and its Desert Swarm defense were very much part of the national discussion. In 1992, the Wildcats played two teams ranked No. 1 — and knocked them both from the top of the polls. We shut out Miami in the 1994 Fiesta Bowl. In 1998, Arizona went 12-1 and finished the year ranked No. 4. A steady stream of All-Americans led the way.

But that success made fans impatient. Dick Tomey, Arizona’s winningest coach ever, was run out of Tucson, and the program was handed to John Mackovic, a man so icy he made deified hoops coach Lute Olson seem downright approachable. Only when Arizona players staged a bloodless coup was that mistake remedied, but the toxic waste that was left behind contaminated the team for years. Soul-crushing losses became the status quo.

Since then, progress has been slow. Coaches attracted and developed talented players such as quarterback Willie Tuitama, receiver and kick returner Mike Thomas and tight end Rob Gronkowski, a third-team Associated Press All-American this year.

Finally, this year, in coach Mike Stoops’ fifth season in Tucson, the Wildcats got to seven wins. The Las Vegas Bowl offered an invitation. And we jumped to accept it.

How happy are Arizona football fans? Think of an Up With People halftime performance. Then imagine that every one of those smiling youngsters just hit a five-team parlay.

We’re downright giddy. We want to be here.

And that’s why the Wildcats are going to smoke the Cougars.

You see, all of the expectations surrounding Brigham Young’s football program and its passionate fan base were built around the dream of not playing in the Las Vegas Bowl on Saturday. The team already has been here each of the past three seasons.

Brigham Young set its sights on the big payout and bigger recognition of a Bowl Championship Series game. To get there, the Cougars would have to win the Mountain West Conference for a third straight year, finish the season undefeated and hope that poll voters and computer rankings recognized them as one of the country’s best teams.

Not only did BYU not come close to realizing that goal, but it watched its biggest rival, Utah, pull off the feat. Ouch.

So BYU’s seniors are back in Las Vegas for a game of no significance to the program.

Arizona’s players, meanwhile, are getting their first taste of bowl hospitality. Sweet hotel rooms. Free stuff. Tasty meals and Las Vegas shows. They’ll remember this week for the rest of their lives. A win will make the memories that much better.

Besides, Arizona is the better team — Las Vegas oddsmakers say so.

Now, I’ve been to enough BYU-UNLV games over the 14 years I’ve lived in Las Vegas to know what Arizona fans are in for on Saturday.

Sam Boyd Stadium is going to be three-quarters full of Cougar crazies. You don’t have to mention that BYU’s 1984 national championship was a fraud or that quarterback Ty Detmer’s 1990 Heisman Trophy resulted from weak competition to fire up these fans.

So let me try to talk down the BYU base with a little perspective:

Should your team make enough plays to pull off the upset, this will be your biggest win of the season. The Cougars were crushed by Texas Christian and Utah, the only two good teams they faced all year, and they needed a universally condemned, horrendous call by an official to beat winless Washington, the worst major-conference team in America.

Arizona is on the rise. BYU’s football program, meanwhile, is like the guy at the gym who works out for more than an hour every day but can’t quite get rid of his gut.

The Cougars have plateaued.

But hey, there is some hope for BYU loyalists who long for a real shot at the big time. I hear the Pac-10 might consider expanding in a couple of years.

Glenn Cook, a graduate of the University of Arizona, is an editorial writer for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Brigham Young football fans can send hate mail to gcook@reviewjournal.com.