Silent Ute misspelled (or maybe he did it on purpose) Cougars-Cougers.

Mistakes happen on a message board especially when you are typing fast but does anyone remember a game back in the early 1990's when the students still lined up outside the stadium the night before for the game. Anyway the Cougs really were on a vandalism tear that year getting the U and there was spray painted crap all over the stadium.

Anyway below the old scholarship box on the concrete was spray painted C-O-U-G-E-R-S. I love it when a guy can't spell his own teams name. I even sent a letter to the athletic department asking them to put a piece of glass over it and a little explination sign so that we could have a little chuckle everytime we entered the stadium.

I guess they decided to give us Tommy Lees offense instead.

If it does, then I don't think I've ever seen anything funnier than the goal post incident at the Utah/BYU game in 1983 (I think). The Utes had given it their all that day but had come up just a bit short (around 50 to 60 points short if I remember correctly). Due to the lack of Utah flags being waved on the field security personnel had been lulled into a false sense that all was well among those well behaved zoobs.

As the final gun sounded, however, trouble was brewing. Twenty to thirty BYU hooligans, hyped up by smuggled Jolt cola and triple dog dared by others no doubt, raced for the south goal post. Security "thought" about busting it up with clubs and mace, but there was just enough of the vandals that the guards merely watched and "admonished" from a short distance away.

While their numbers were sufficient to ward off security, there was not enough to truly take the goal down properly. Done correctly, a goal post should be mowed under with enough force to snap the thing off at the base. This sometimes sends jagged shards of metal shrapnel flying into the crowd but that is merely a reminder that to the people tearing the thing down it is about more than just football. I once witnessed a relatively young Oklahoma fan with an eye patch look at a very old Nebraska fan whose right forearm bore the unmistakable mark of having had a giant wood sliver embedded in it for at least forty years. They nodded to each other. Each of them understood and NOTHING MORE NEEDED TO BE SAID.

The zoobs on the field that day did not understand this and as they began to attack the goal their focus began to wander. Several of them were hoisted up to the cross bar but others were beginning to suffer from the first feelings of guilt. While they continued to act as if they were still engaged in the effort you could detect that their heart was no longer in it. It was as if they were having a flashback to high school when they had encouraged and contributed to the purchase of the whiskey but lost their nerve and only "pretended" to drink it when the bottle was passed around.

While this may have been good for their eternal salvation, it was not necessarily beneficial to the temporal concerns of those few standing on the cross bar. It was also not good for the health of a BYU student nicknamed “Bish”. Bish was not standing on the cross bar but not because he didn’t want to. Quite frankly it would have taken half of Cougar stadium to lift Bish onto the cross bar at that time in his life. But Bish was a good guy and he wanted to be there with his zoob buddies tearing down the post.

As Bish stood in the middle of the end zone and watched, those on the cross bar began rocking the post back and forth in teeter totter fashion. To Bish, staring up at the thing in the late afternoon sky this created a visual effect that resulted in the man becoming HYPNOTIZED. This was unfortunate because about that time the post let out a sickening scream and the horseshoe section began to fall toward the North end zone. Those on the ground next to him ran like schoolchildren being sprayed with water. Those on the cross bar leapt like they were exiting a runaway train. Bish just stood and watched as the thing came tumbling down.

There is a television commercial that airs these days for fox regional sports that depicts a fictional foreign sports broadcast of a man attempting to catch what appears to be a large log pole. Of course the thing crushes the man into the ground to the stunned silence of the crowd. Bish did not fare much better. While he was not crushed under by the pole, it did strike him square in the head on its journey downward. To those who have not witnessed such an event the first thing to know is a goal post is extremely heavy. They are felled rather easily because they are easily leveraged. As a free weight, however, they are a load.

Bish would probably testify to this because when it hit him it knocked him into Sunday (or Monday or even later but definitely out of Saturday). As he lay dying (for all anyone knew) his buddies began slinking off the field in the manner of Carl Spackler exiting the 18th green after the reverend was struck by lightning. The security personnel who had warned that something “bad” would happen were now nervously giggling and saying “we told you so” (simultaneously enjoying the event for proving them correct yet feeling properly guilty about the joy). Bish, he just laid there bleeding and unconscious. And somewhere in the far reaches of the newly expanded stadium, a young Val Hale thought “they ought to ban those goal posts. They just incite the crowd and that’s how you get somebody hurt.”

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