BYU Football: Five opponents the Cougars should schedule soon

Navy

When Bronco Mendenhall left for Virginia, the search for a new head coach at BYU ultimately came down to two people: Kalani Sitake and Ken Niumatalolo.

Niumatalolo decided to remain with Navy, where he’s been the head coach for the last decade, which opened the door for Sitake to take the reins at BYU.

Now the two LDS coaches should find a time to go head-to-head.

The Cougars have only played the Midshipmen twice, once in 1978 and the other in 1989. In that first matchup, Navy edged BYU 23-17 in the Holiday Bowl.

The Cougars got revenge eleven years later, going to Annapolis and beating the Midshipmen 31-10. The two teams haven’t faced off since.

Just like Army, Navy has a rich football tradition but struggled for the most part from the 70’s to the 90’s. Things changed, though, when Paul Johnson took over as head coach in 2002. He led Navy to five straight bowl games before moving on to Georgia Tech. His successor was Niumatalolo, who’s continued to build the program into a perennial Top-40 team.

Also like Army, it makes little sense that BYU and Navy never scheduled each other early in the Cougars’ independence, since the Midshipmen were also independent until joining the AAC in 2015.

According to fbschedules.com, Navy still has openings in some of their future schedules, so a deal between these two can still happen.