Missing 'Y' stickers

While BYU isn’t practicing again until Friday, I’m going through my notebook to provide thoughts, observations and quotes on interesting tidbits that I’ve gleaned during spring drills.

One thing we’ve noticed this spring is that the players who are new to the program don’t have the “Y” on their helmets. That’s right, guys like Jake Heaps and Joshua Quezada are wearing plain white helmets with no stickers or decals whatsoever.

Coach Bronco Mendenhall has decided to make the young guys prove themselves and earn their “Y” sticker.

Mendenhall explained: “After thinking about our program and ways to continually improve it and ways to have them value the experience, once they make it through a fall camp, then they’ll earn their stripes and their stickers. It seemed more of the right thing to do. I’ve possibly been rewarding some of our younger players a little bit too early before they’ve had a complete, kind of a right of passage into the program. Once they’ve earned it, they’ll get them. That will be once fall camp finishes.”

Speaking of the new players, I asked offensive coordinator Robert Anae about how they are adapting and how they are doing in replacing the veterans BYU lost to graduation or missions.

“We lost some key people,” he said. “That’s the beauty of college football. I think that’s why people buy tickets and come to games. Not only are they interested in seeing good, prepared kids play, but they’re interested in how clean they can play. A lot of that has to do with how information gets transferred from one group to the next. People are interested in seeing that. You develop one group of guys, then they exit. What’s that next group going to pick up on? I’m pleased, more than anything, with how willing they are to learn and work.”