intentionally taking a team off your schedule is absolutely fear - there are no two ways around it. The good doctor was afraid that the schedule was too hard so he replaced BYU with Fresno - That is fear. Period.
Second - when Utah made the decision to not schedule BYU the past 10 games were 5-5. So you get no points for pretending that That Other Team has "owned" us. Even now "owned" is a pathetic comment. Every game in the past 10 years except for two were single score games and those two were BYU train wrecks - not TOT dominance.
I get that you like to build Utah up. You work at it very hard. But "dominance" is not a word an objective football fan would use when describing the last 10 years of BYU/TOT football. In fact if you look at any big rivalry in football, runs like TOT has had the past four years are very common. "Dominance" is what BYU did to TOT for 20 years from 72 - 92. Since then the series has been competitive. I get that for a loser fanbase like TOTs a few wins seems like dominance since their fandom goes back exactly seven years. But it's not.