ESPN has a great story on Josh Heupel’s career as a player and coach in college football. Makes me think back on that Gwyneth Paltrow movie “Sliding Doors” where she missed boarding a train and the movie then shows a parallel storyline on what her life would’ve been like had she made the train. BYU potentially missed an opportunity to “go through the sliding door” back when Heupel was an under the radar HS senior in South Dakota and then again as a QB down at Snow College during the 1998 season after a difficult season at Weber St.

Heupel grew up in an LDS family in South Dakota and wasn’t heavily recruited out of high school so ended up at Weber St. It’s understandable that BYU wasn’t interested in him in 1996 as a senior in high school, however, in a total “Sliding Door” moment it’s interesting to think how things might have played out differently had BYU offered the LDS QB to come in and sit a year behind Sark in 1996 and then compete in 1997 with Feterik for the QB1 position. He might have extended that QBU era a little longer (instead of struggling the latter half of the 90’s with unremarkable QB play).

After a year struggling with injuries etc at Weber, Heupel transferred to Snow College and had a great year, catching the interest of Mike Leach who was an assistant coach at Oklahoma. He saw Heupel as the perfect QB to use in his Air Raid offense and turn around the Sooners under Stoops. Things took off for Heupel from that point and he led the Sooners to a Natty and finished 2nd in the Heisman voting. After college he started rising the ranks as a football coach with a strong sense of loyalty to the Sooners until Stoops fired him after a difficult stretch. Now the head coach at Tennessee, Heupel has the Vols primed for greatness and ready to compete with Alabama and Georgia for supremacy in the SEC.

The story by ESPN focuses on Heupel’s sense of loyalty with the Sooners during his rise as an assistant coach and OC until Stoops felt the need to shuffle things up and reorganize. Had he come to BYU instead, that sense of loyalty could’ve led to Heupel rise through the coaching ranks at BYU after an illustrious playing career. Maybe Heupel is the OC for BYU during that 2012 season and give us a top 5 or 10 offense to pair with our top 5 defense that year and we finally get that elusive BCS bowl moment that eluded us? Maybe he becomes the HC in 2016 after Bronco left for Virginia? Would BYU have gotten a Big12 invite sooner (like in the early BCS expansion period)? Would a higher profile BYU have impacted the Yewt’s rise to glory under Whitt by being more competitive head to head for in-state recruiting? Definitely an interesting sliding door moment to ponder.