SDSU, BYU rivalry rekindled for them

Steve Fisher and BYU coach Dave Rose bumped into each other a couple summers ago at an offseason event. It was the first time they had seen one another since San Diego State and BYU had been confirmed as participants in the eight-team 2014 Maui Invitational but months before the bracket would be determined.

They just laughed. They knew.

Rose: “We looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, that will probably be a first-round matchup.’”

Teams at the Maui Invitational are not seeded equitably into brackets but placed according to the Mainland TV viewership and mischievous appeal. The late game in Monday's opening round: SDSU v. BYU, 8:30 PST, ESPN2.

“We look for good story lines in first-round matchups,” said tournament chairman Dave Odom, himself a former college basketball coach. “When you look at BYU and San Diego State, they were fierce rivals for a long time. Now we’re giving them a chance, if only for a night, to renew it.”

In other words: If you won’t play each other, we’ll make you.

SDSU and BYU played have played 71 times in men’s basketball, all but three between 1979 and 2011 while both belonged to the WAC and Mountain West conferences. Then BYU decided to go independent in football so it wouldn’t have to share television and bowl revenue with an entire league, and the Mountain West chased off the Cougars in all other sports, too.

SDSU, a school with a conspicuous lack of a true rival, suddenly didn’t have one just when the caldron started to boil.

Just when “The Show” student section was showing up to basketball games in bike helmets and short-sleeved white dress shirts. Just when Fisher was emailing them a letter saying “we cannot cross the line into topics that are out of bounds and distasteful, particularly making fun of one’s religion.” Just when prominent boosters were sending a letter to BYU's president demanding an investigation into alleged foul play in the football replay booth. Just when a member of SDSU’s football broadcast team was saying on radio: “I hate BYU and I hate everything they stand for.”

Both schools insist a temporary restraining order wasn’t issued by either administration or conference (BYU’s other sports now play in the WCC), that it was more a function of geography than enmity, logistics more than loathing. The reality, of course, is they have barely played, anywhere, in any sport, since.

There was the first-round encounter in the 2012 NIT in women’s basketball and the Poinsettia Bowl in football later that year, but those were arranged marriages. The only team sports that actually scheduled games are softball, inviting the Cougars to the San Diego Classic the past three years, and men’s tennis last February. That’s it.

“I think it’s been a lot of factors,” SDSU athletic director Jim Sterk said. “We play enough at altitude that we don’t need to go to altitude again. And Utah State is in (the MW), so you’re already going to Salt Lake City and Utah, so why go back? It hasn’t been anything intentional.”

There are two ways to view this. One is that the two sides needed to cool their uranium rods before a nuclear meltdown, needed to be sent to their respective rooms for a “timeout,” after the animosity nudged the line and occasionally crept across it. The other is that rivalries, bitter and petty and vengeful as they can be, are the fabric of college sports and Cougars-Aztecs has all the necessary ingredients.

The private school owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in pristine quaint mountain town. And the massive state school once ranked among the nation’s top party schools in the sprawling beach metropolis.

Altitude vs. amplitude.

Those differences fueled a more or less friendly rivalry in the early years. That changed in 2010, when the Cougars came to Viejas Arena for men’s basketball and won 71-69 behind 33 points from guard Jimmer Fredette still recovering from a bout of mononucleosis. A sign in the student section: “Jimmer, which wife gave you mono?”

As the final seconds ticked away and BYU fans in Viejas celebrated, the SDSU students – many wearing bike helmets, white shirts and name tags to mock LDS missionaries – chanted: “You’re still Mormon, you’re still Mormon.”

That resulted in a flurry of apologetic letters from SDSU administrators.

“I’m sure you understand the students’ rights of free speech and freedom of expression,” wrote former associate athletic director Don Oberhelman. “I don’t approve of or condone their attire, but their costumes are a regular occurrence based on who we are playing. 98 percent of what they do at our games makes for a fantastic basketball atmosphere, the 2 percent like this makes me cringe.”

Nine months later, BYU was cringing. The Aztecs lost 24-21 in football in Provo after officials reviewed video replay on a key fourth-quarter drive and refused to rule a BYU player had fumbled despite clear evidence on TV that he indeed did. Turns out, two of the three personnel working the replay booth that day were BYU alums, including one, Chad Bunn, who was an athletic department employee.

Three of SDSU’s most influential boosters – Leon Parma, Bob Payne and Jack Goodall – penned a letter to BYU president Cecil Samuelson to “stop the stonewalling” and “declare the game forfeited” if evidence of improprieties was uncovered.

And then there were the comments by Chris Ello, the color commentator on SDSU’s football broadcasts. On his radio talk show the following week, he said SDSU players have told him “BYU is the dirtiest, slimiest, most ill-behaved football team that they play every single year,” adding that the school “is nothing but a front for utter hypocrisy.”

Two weeks later, the Aztecs were playing at BYU in women’s soccer and had their goalkeeper ejected in the first half. The game was telecast by BYUtv, and SDSU coach Mike Friesen was interviewed at halftime. He disputed the call and made a quip about “Replay-gate” that earned him a public reprimand from the Mountain West.

But the good side of a college sports rivalry, the ability to elevate competition to sublime levels, came in the winter of 2011 when the schools played in basketball three times in six memorable weeks, all epic encounters between teams ranked in the Top 10, Jimmer shooting, Kawhi Leonard dunking, arenas shaking, national TV audiences gasping.

“The last year we played,” said Rose, in his 18th season at BYU as an assistant or head coach, “that game at our place was just unbelievable – one of the best college basketball atmosphere ever. The one down at their place was a CBS national broadcast and that was an unbelievable game, too.”

The third game was in the final of the Mountain West tournament, a 72-54 SDSU victory that ended with Leonard clapping and chirping in Fredette’s face in a rare display of emotion from the stoic Aztecs forward.

“I’m not going to repeat anything that he said,” Fredette told media afterward, “but he was excited that they won (and he) decided to say some things. I’m not going to back down. I said a couple things as well, then we were done.”

In more ways than one. The teams haven’t played since.

Rose said the two staffs have talked quietly in recent years about a home-and-home series but were too late in the process and couldn’t find suitable dates. The only way it might work, he suggested, is to schedule the games “three or four years out,” a rarity in college basketball.

Fans would love it, certainly. TV would love it. But there are risks from SDSU’s end. It’s another game in altitude for a team that already makes a half-dozen trips into the mountains annually, and BYU has a remarkable record at Viejas Arena. The Cougars are responsible for three of the Aztecs’ last seven home losses and are 7-6 all-time there.

“Dave and I are good friends, our wives are good friends,” Fisher said. “We probably someplace talked about wanting to play but we haven’t pushed it to the point where we say: ‘Let’s get a game going.’ But it might be time to do that. You always want to play a team that you know is good and has a tradition about their program.

“I would be disappointed if we weren’t playing Vegas and New Mexico, and you could put BYU in that same realm. This spurs me to want to talk to Rose in Maui and see if we can rekindle the series.”