Ty Detmer: For Utah Fans It Was The Worst of Times, But It Was The Beginning Of The Best Of Times

The night BYU beat Miami in September 1990, you could feel that BYU fans were going to spend the next 22 years talking about it.  I was just starting my second year at Utah and knew how ugly it was going to be.  I grew up a Wyoming fan and knew BYU fans were just awful but I’d never had to live next to them every day.  There were BYU fans at my high school but they knew better than to talk about.  We handle justice (or whatever we might think is justice, we don’t read much) differently in the Cowboy State.

But BYU fans in the late 80’s and early 90’s, well that was a special breed.

Things were ugly that night.  Utah had only beaten BYU twice in the last 20 years.  And the payback for the Rice Bowl had been something awful.  BYU was up something like 137 to negative six at halftime, and honestly it wasn’t that close.  BYU ran the score up many times but honestly not that day.  So when BYU beat Miami and because there were such slim pickings in the Heisman race that Detmer essentially locked it up.  Utah fans were settling in till 1998 when they’d beat BYU again.  It looked like it was going to be another long dark winter.

But something else happened that night, honestly I’m not even sure how many Utah fans were watching it.

LaVon Edwards returns a blocked field goal 91 yards to preserve a Utah win against Minnesota. If you watch close you can see, our new head coach running down the field to jump into the pile.

Looking back, we should have sensed that something had changed for us as well. Having a coach who cared so much that he would do that, well that has to take you a long way to being competitive. While Ron McBride wouldn’t be the one to deliver Sugar and Fiesta Bowls, he was the coach who delivered on the notion that we could be as good as or better than BYU.

In September 1990, the concept that we could be competitive as BYU was a difficult thing to imagine, to say the least.

And oh how quickly things change.

Ty’s Heisman Campaign ended like this…

And then in 1993 came The Kick…

Utah had won in Provo for the first time in forever and had put and end to beating BYU just once a decade.

Yes Ty Detmer and BYU beating Miami was a real low point for Utah fans, but it was that night that everything began to change.