It was clearly a concerted effort at that time to bury BYU into irrelevance, pump up the Utes and the "very difficult" PAC12, and garner the recruiting-winning-recruiting upward cycle.
10 years later, they're receiving BYU's charity to get into a true "very difficult" P4 conference and getting pummeled in it while BYU is the darling.
We really needed to take a page from the sploosh-canoe's playbook, and leave them to wither on the PAC12 vine.