How would you like it if your team--namely Utah State--lost a close one at your other archrival, say, BYU, and in looking up at the Marriott Center video board, it reads like this:
Dear UT St.:
Enjoy The Loss!
- Your Big Brother BYU
First off, you have to admire that the scoreboard operator, a student in BYU’s IT department filling in on an emergency basis, took the time to make sure that the words would all fit on the screen. And, they did. (Perhaps they should have checked the final score too, because USU was credited with a basket that was disallowed, making the real final score 78-72. Hey, when it‘s your first day…)
Obviously, if you’re a USU fan you wouldn’t feel all that swell as you read, considering your team just lost 78-74, uh, 78-72, in a nail biter between two likely NCAA Tournament-bound, Top 25 teams that played their butts off. It just ever so slightly overshadowed the best college hoops game in Utah all season (sorry, Utah and Weber State) and put a sour taste in some Aggie fans' mouths.
Namely, thems is fightin’ words that rivals never actually say to one another, right? Negatory; the BYU-Utah State football game in Logan this year featured some parking lot fisticuffs in the Aggie fans’ post-game revelry.
Will it ever change? Probably not, and not even with the upcoming conference alignment changes. In fact, it will probably make things worse, because some people--like Utah State--may have inferiority complexes. Jus’ sayin…
Everyone knows The Holy War has had its share of memorable quips, like Lenny Gomes “pump my gas” comment directed at Ute players of yore. And who can forget Max Hall’s famous last words of “hate“? They’re so known it isn’t even necessary to repeat them.
Or, when ex-Ute head coach Urban Meyer simply referred to BYU as “The Team Down South” in all of his rhetoric leading up to each game in the few years he was on The Hill? You get the point.
Were USU fans in the right to have been pompous jerks heading out of Romney Stadium despite winning for the first time in more than a decade? No. But, that’s how rivalries go. Neither was the BYU student with his post yesterday evening.
Who knows? Perhaps the IT student in question made the trek up to Logan, watched his Cougars lose to the Aggies for the first time in who knows when, and took out his frustration.
However, BYU officials didn’t find the video board message too hilarious--at least not publicly--and released the following statement today:
…As a university, we apologize for the inappropriate message that was briefly posted on the BYU scoreboard at the end of the Utah State-BYU men's basketball game. BYU’s athletic director Tom Holmoe also has apologized to Utah State’s athletic director, Scott Barnes. As Tom explained to him, the university is extremely sorry for this message, which does not reflect the sentiment of BYU Athletics or the university.
Athletics does not operate the scoreboard in the Marriott Center; instead, this is handled by the university’s IT department. In this incident, the usual person was not at work because of a family emergency. The student employee filling in took the liberty of putting up what he thought was a humorous message. This matter has been addressed with the student, who regrets his action.
The only part of the statement few buy is that it was done with humor. From the looks of the statement, it was all about retribution. And more than one Cougar got their just dessert.
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