BTW-- having grown up there, I can tell you that the Oregon-Oregon State "problem" was never solved (really) until the invention of the Bowl Alliance and eventually the BCS. At that point, those schools had something concrete to set themselves apart from schools like BYU and were able to recruit and pay coaches and build facilities in a way that would never have been possible before.

When I was a kid in Oregon in the 80s, while there was some "power conference" smack, in the end no one seriously doubted that BYU was a better overall program than either Oregon school.

Oregon State fans did backflips when Dave Kragthorpe was hired to bring the "BYU Offense" to Oregon State.