I'm posting this in the football category, but really, it deserves to be all BYU.

I've been a Cougar fan since I had to watch an occasional BYU game on the church satellite dish at the stake center. I remember staying up until o-dark-30 watching BYU play Hawaii, or SDSU, or whoever. I didn't care. I loved the team then, and I love it now. I remember Cosic, Ainge, Roberts, Bradley, all of them. Bosco, Young, Nielsen, Clay Brown, Kozlowski, you name the guy, I probably saw him play.

This? What we're seeing now? I don't have a place to put it in my BYU experience.

Now look. Retzlaff does not make me forget about Detmer. I'm in no way suggesting that this team is as good as the '96 team they honored last night. The BYU basketball team, as overloaded as it is, hasn't made a single shot yet. I get the "pump the brakes" that some of you are saying right now.

And yet...

Let's start with the things that DON'T have to be analyzed and nuanced. The game-day experience is excellent. Beyond excellent. Our stadiums are clean and fairly orderly (although section numbers on the LES portal signs would be nice), the food is good, and the in-stadium entertainment is as good as anyplace, college OR pro, in sports. Let that sink in for a minute. You will not, I assure you, be entertained any better anywhere. This is not a cheap experience for those that love BYU. It's good fun for anyone.

This actually also applies outside of the big two sports. Our entire program, from start to finish, is as good as you find anywhere.

And the teams are good. Not just good. We play in one of the top conferences in the nation and we are holding our own. In basketball, we took down one of the most storied programs in the history of the sport--on their home court--last year. That was not a fluke. Our football team gets a lot of crap, and some of it is deserved, but even in a year most of us were very disappointed in we beat Arkansas (don't tell me they were terrible last year--that's kind of the point. Everyone sucks at some point, except Alabama. But Arkansas STILL sucks, and we arguably do not). Over the last few years we've beaten the who's who of football programs. BYU has nothing to be ashamed of on the gridiron.

And this year we're 4-0 and we just bludgeoned a team ranked #13. We have not allowed a team to score a touchdown this season in any competitive game. We held SMU to 15 on a field where they average in the 40s. They put 66 on TCU yesterday. KSU had--HAD--the longest active streak of 28 point games in the nation. Until we allowed them 9. Parker Kingston scored more touchdowns than Kansas State, a phrase that should be completely impossible to truthfully utter.

Basketball? We lost a head coach we loved and a man who had done much good for the program. Then we replaced him with...well, I don't even know how to describe this guy. For a man that hasn't yet coached a jump ball, let alone a whole game, he's done more to energize not just the program but the entire sports experience at BYU than anyone since...LaVell? What's the comparator here? No one in basketball comes close. The effect he's having on the entire university's sports teams is very hard to overstate. We have top recruits--not the top UTAH recruits, but the top recruits ON THE PLANET--at our games. Regularly. We make the top 5 of practically every hoop star in the world. Nothing in any sport at BYU has touched this level.

I'm watching the bolt of lightning strike KSU yesterday and thinking, "Is this real? Can this actually be happening?" My school, my beloved BYU, is putting on the kind of show reserved for Texas, Notre Dame, Michigan. I've been to the Big House. A hundred years of tradition. They do many things better than we do, but it's a fact that we do some things better than they do. The gameday experience in Provo takes a back seat to nobody. And in hoops, we have the entire front bench all to ourselves. NO ONE does a college basketball game better than we do.

And by Heaven and Earth...we WIN. WE WIN. We expect to win. And then we do.

Basketball. Football. Volleyball. Soccer. Track. Field. Not yet baseball, but a man can dream. We're good. We really are. Not "you should respect us because we punch way above our weight" good, as we were in the 80s. Not "hey, we won 14 games" good, like '96. Not "Jimmermania" good, while we had one of the incandescent stars of all time on the floor. This...it's different. This is a place you want to come play. This is a place you want to come play if you are from RUSSIA. Not just-as-good-as-big-time. Big time itself.

Surely, work to do. We've won nothing permanent for a long while. The football team is, yes, 4-0, but we've had good starts before. The basketball team needs a squad of interpreters just to communicate defensive assignments. There may be smoke without fire, and mirrors without solid reality. Maybe. Maybe not all of it is real.

But some of it is. And the rest is delicious.

Eat up, Cougars. And get used to it.