PROVO -- There is not a team on this planet that BYU would love to beat to win the Mountain West Conference championship more than Utah.
Wish granted.The opportunity is now there. The league title is exactly what the Cougars and Utes will be playing for when they renew their annual grudge match on Saturday at 1 p.m. in Provo.
Not that BYU planned it this way.
The Cougars had hoped to wrap up the title in Laramie. But that was before Wyoming laid a 31-17 licking on them and slapping them with their first conference defeat.
BYU, which dropped to 19th in both the AP and USA Today/ESPN polls, wants to forget about that humbling loss and move on to the Utes.
"We'll respond fine. I'm confident we'll come out and be fine next week," said quarterback Kevin Feterik. "We have too many good guys to have a breakdown . . . It's the biggest game of the year now."
"We have a lot of pride," linebacker Rob Morris said. "We'll bounce back and get ready to play Utah."
But can the Cougars put that loss behind them so easily?
The Utes, meanwhile, are coming off a 52-7 drubbing of New Mexico and playing for a piece of the MWC championship. Plus, they have won three straight games in Cougar Stadium, dating back to 1993.
Just how concerned is coach LaVell Edwards? "I'm always concerned when the whole season is on the line," he said, adding that the fact his team is playing Utah "just puts that more pressure on."
The Cougars are trying to avoid a late-season swoon reminiscent of last year, when they lost their final two games following a seven-game win streak. BYU had won six game in a row prior to last Saturday's debacle at Wyoming.
Penalties, fumbles, dropped passes and mental lapses all conspired against the Cougars. Wyoming had something to do with those problems as the Cowboys executed their game plan almost flawlessly.
First, BYU's defense was shredded at times by the triple shoot offense. Wyoming spread the Cougars' defensive secondary out and was able to do two things few teams have done against BYU this season -- unleash a successful rushing attack and make big plays.
In all, BYU surrendered nine plays that gained more than 20 yards, including a 44-yard catch-and-run by Tim Beasley on Wyoming's first play from scrimmage, setting up the Cowboys' first score.
The BYU offense, on the other hand, was stymied by the Wyoming defense. "We played with three safeties. That's something we haven't done before," said Cowboy coach Dana Dimel, who directed his team from the press box for the second straight game.
Wyoming also ran ferocious pass rushes that came at Feterik from all over the field. "We brought our linebackers in on different angles," Dimel said. "It created confusion for them in their blocking schemes."
"They kept lining up all over the place," said Feterik, who was sacked four times for minus 38 yards and took another painful beating.
Like all the other Cougar players, Morris has now experienced his first game at War Memorial Stadium. He said he doesn't blame BYU's poor performance on the Wyoming fans, which, at 26,083, was the school's largest home crowd of the year.
"It's no different from anywhere else we play," he said.
Dimel called the victory "10 times better" than beating Wyoming's other archrival, Colorado State. That feeling seemed to be shared by the student body, which leveled the goal posts after the game and carried them around the field to celebrate the school's first win over BYU since 1988.