The rumors began to circulate in the days leading up to the start of the college football season. The official announcement came on September 10th. After a decade as a football independent, BYU would be joining the Big 12 beginning with the 2023 season.

This Saturday, the man who had once led the charge for the school to seek Big 12 membership will make his return to Provo. While the football coach at BYU, Bronco Mendenhall had been urged to tone down his public stumping that life as a football independent wasn’t sustainable. It was ultimately a key factor in Mendenhall’s decision to jump to Virginia following the 2015 season.

“It is kind of a full circle thing,” Darnell Dickson, columnist and writer at the Daily Herald in Provo, said this week. “Here’s BYU headed to the Big 12 and yep, he’s coming to town.”

Mendenhall spent 11 years and won 99 games as head coach of the Cougars. Now in his sixth season at UVa, he’s 36-34 with the Wahoos. Mendenhall surpassed the .500 mark at Virginia for the first time two weeks ago, with the third of four straight wins that have pushed this year’s team to 6-2. The Cavaliers will take that winning streak into Saturday night’s 10:15 p.m. (ET) kickoff at LaVell Edwards Stadium.

It’s a game that Mendenhall fought hard to get removed from the schedule when he first took the Virginia job. Much of that uneasiness about the matchup has faded, he admitted this week.

“It's six years,” Bronco said, “and that time is -- it adds perspective, and it also sometimes has your heart grow fonder, but also at times it allows separation. Sometimes it just takes time.”

Dickson’s arrival in Provo to cover BYU coincided with Mendenhall’s first season as the team’s defensive coordinator in 2003. He can still recall immediately being struck by the stark contrast between the way Mendenhall pushed his defensive players versus the practice habits of the offense.

“These guys would be doing get-offs and they’d be doing precision drills, and you know how he is about everything having to be done perfectly. If you don’t do it perfectly you do it again,” Dickson described. “That’s how it was with the defense, and then the offense is over there. They’re running their ladders. They’re talking, they’re getting drinks. It was very strange.

"So then he takes over the whole program and the whole program is like that, the offense and the defense,” he added. “And the defensive guys are like, ‘We told you guys.’”

Mendenhall was promoted to head coach on December 13, 2004. The Cougars had endured three straight losing seasons prior to the coaching change, a stretch of on-field struggles that BYU fans were unaccustomed to. Before that three-year downturn, BYU hadn’t finished a season with a losing record since 1973.

Dickson watched as Mendenhall set out to rebuild the BYU culture in his image, using methods the coach would later revisit when he first arrived in Charlottesville 11 years later.

“Very clearly, his way of building a program is tearing it down first,” Dickson said. “Letting them know, ‘You guys have to earn this. You have to earn the right to wear the V. You have to earn the right to wear the Y at BYU. You have to wear the right to wear a number.’ Everything is earned.”

BYU finished Bronco’s first season with a 6-6 overall record that included a second-place finish in the Mountain West Conference (at 5-3) and a Las Vegas Bowl appearance. The Cougars then won at least 10 games in each of the next four seasons, including three 11-2 campaigns. They went a combined 29-3 in the Mountain West in that stretch with a pair of unbeaten runs through the conference.

But the program’s time in the Mountain West would soon come to an abrupt end. Not long after rival Utah left for the Pac-12 and armed with a new eight-year TV deal from ESPN, BYU announced in 2010 that it was leaving the Mountain West for football independence.

Jared Lloyd joined the BYU beat at the Daily Herald in 2011, in time for the Cougars’ first season as an independent.

"I think the BYU football program needed someone like Bronco during that time,” Lloyd said. “Someone who could focus the athletes and keep things organized. Kind of working toward the goals even as the landscape was shifting.”

Bronco was watching as that landscape continued to shift. He was blunt in his opinion that independence was not a sound plan longterm. Without the resources of a Power 5 program, it was challenging to attract and retain assistant coaches. He saw the other schools with religious affiliations, like Baylor and TCU, in the Big 12 and pointed to the league as a logical fit. But the school’s options were limited.

“He said that from the beginning, ‘Independence is not sustainable,’ when BYU went that route,” said Dickson. “And everyone kind of went, ‘Whoa. Maybe he doesn’t want to stay here.’”

Paul Gustavson was a walk-on football player for Hall of Fame coach LaVell Edwards at BYU in the early 1970s. Some three decades later, he was one of the leading strategy and leadership consultants in the country. He’d never met Mendenhall when the phone rang one day in December of 2004.

It was one of the first calls Bronco made after being promoted at BYU. He was looking for leadership advice as he embarked on the first head coaching role of his career. The two strangers, speaking for the first time, arranged to meet in person. Gustavson gave Mendenhall a reading assignment to complete before that meeting. The head coach showed up with the article marked up with highlighter, the margins filled with hand-written questions and comments.

Those first interactions served as the launching point for a professional relationship and eventual close friendship that, by Gustavson’s estimation, has sparked hundreds of hours conversation about ways Mendenhall can evolve and learn, and improve his football programs. Gustavson is also one of the co-authors, along with Alyson Von Feldt, of Mendenhall’s book ‘Running Into the Wind: 5 Strategies for Building a Successful Team.’

So Gustavson understood better than most why leaving for Virginia was a move Mendenhall felt he had to make.

“He wanted a new challenge,” Gustavson summarized. “As an independent, he said winning nine or 10 games, which is what he was doing, it wasn’t winning conference championships.”

Mendenhall had long been transparent with the local media in Utah that “he was not a lifetime guy at BYU,” as Dickson described it. There had been previous rumblings of some interest in the Wisconsin job when it had been open. Bronco indicated that he was intrigued by the idea of coaching at one of the service academies because of their values and structure.

He wanted a school where, like at BYU, football was not the biggest piece of the puzzle. Mendenhall found that at Virginia, where high academics were the top priority.

“It wasn’t a bombshell like, ‘Oh my goodness, he’s leaving,’” Lloyd said of the December 2015 news that Mendenhall had taken the UVa job. “At least not for people who were paying attention.”

Gustavson drew the analogy to the ‘startup mentality’ often found in Silicon Valley, where those who launch a successful company no longer feel challenged, so they leave to start another new company. Mendenhall averaged nine wins in his 11 BYU seasons; at UVa, he was taking over a program that only had two winning seasons from 2006 to 2015.

“Taking a storied program that had sort of lost its luster, and showing what I can do in turning that around,” Gustavson said. “He turned the BYU football program around. It was terrible. Three losing seasons. No bowl games. Problems off the field.”

Still, the decision wasn’t easy. It meant uprooting his family—and leaving behind a home near his father’s Utah ranch—for a move across the country, and asking his assistants to do the same. He’d be leaving a place where his Mormon faith was woven into the fabric of the community. Bronco talked to thousands of LDS members at his ‘fireside’ sessions prior to BYU road games. And the hardest part for Mendenhall, according to Gustavson, was the players he’d be leaving behind.

“That was tough for him,” he said. “He’s a very mission- and purpose-oriented kind of person.”

At Virginia, Mendenhall found the challenge he was looking for. Starting with a loss at home to Richmond, an FCS-level opponent, the Wahoos went just 2-10 in his first season. In his second year, the Hoos won six games and made a bowl appearance. By his fourth season in 2019, UVa was a nine-win team, had won the program’s first-ever ACC Coastal Division title and, for the first time since 2003, had beaten arch-rival Virginia Tech.

“When they won the Coastal championship, that was a huge deal for him,” Gustavson said. “Beating Virginia Tech was huge for him, because he had come there with the notion that, ‘Virginia Tech always beats us.’ He had put that as a priority.”

Off the field, Mendenhall has strong relationships with both university president Jim Ryan and athletics director Carla Williams. The coach and his family have settled onto a ranch with horses and cattle that sits about 10 minutes from the university’s football offices.

In Provo, BYU football was so ingrained in the community his wife Holly couldn’t go to the grocery store without facing questions about play-calling or which players were on the field. His sons often faced similar scrutiny at school.

“In Virginia, and I’ve been out to eat with him and with his family, people don’t come up to him. He just loves that,” Gustavson said. “He can live his life as a normal person, which he absolutely loves.”

Ben Criddle was a walk-on freshman defensive back on the 2005 BYU team, Mendenhall’s first as head coach. He eventually worked his way into a scholarship and onto the field as a two-year starter at cornerback.

When asked what he thought of Bronco’s legacy at BYU, Criddle, now the host of a daily sports radio show in Utah, described his former head coach as “a savior of sorts, as it pertains to football.”

A proud alumn, Criddle boasted that BYU is one of the 10 winningest programs in college football over the past 50 years. But the Cougars had lost their winning way under Crowton. Mendenhall brought back a high level of accountability. He emphasized discipline and effort.

“He came in and revamped it, recharged it and got BYU back on track where they’re supposed to be,” Criddle said, “where they’re expected to be and where fans want to be.”

Criddle also pointed to the BYU all-time record lists, which are populated with players who played for Mendenhall and offensive coordinator Robert Anae: Quarterbacks John Beck and Max Hall. Receivers Cody Hoffman and Austin Collie. Tight end Dennis Pitta. Running backs Harvey Unga, Jamaal Williams and Curtis Brown.

“You look at all these significant, iconic football players that came through BYU in the modern era, and he was the head coach at BYU during that time,” Criddle argued. “That’s what his legacy should be.”

Jake Edmonds, a former Utah local TV personality and regular co-host of Criddle’s radio show, agreed that Mendenhall left a positive legacy. He called Bronco the face of the second-most successful era in BYU history.

But Edmonds also brought up one potential blemish on the head coach’s BYU resume. Bronco went just 3-7 against arch-rival Utah, with defeats in his final four meetings with the Utes. Mendenhall’s final game as BYU’s coach was a 35-28 loss to Utah in the 2015 Las Vegas Bowl.

“And he left with that losing streak kind of hanging over his head,” Edmonds said.”And I don’t know if fans wanted him to fix that before he left or if fans felt like he was kind of running away from that.”

There were other complaints from corners of the fanbase. Early in Mendenhall’s tenure, potential magical seasons were derailed by losses. The 2008 team was 6-0 and ranked No. 8 in the country when it lost 32-7 at TCU; a year later, the Cougars were again unbeaten and ranked ninth when they lost 54-28 at home to Florida State.

Those early seasons in the Mountain West set a high bar for success that BYU couldn’t quite replicate while playing more challenging schedules as an independent. There were some grumblings that the program had grown stagnant in Bronco’s final few seasons, unable to get over that eight-to-nine-win hump.

“Obviously people wanted BYU to have one of those special seasons where they would go undefeated and maybe sneak into a New Years Six bowl game,” said Dickson, “and that never happened.”

But any ill feelings have largely eroded over the last six years. That’s helped by the fact that the BYU program has continued to play at a high level under new coach Kalani Sataki, highlighted by last year’s 11-1 campaign that produced quarterback Zach Wilson, the No. 2 overall pick in this year’s NFL Draft.

Many BYU fans at least casually track the UVa program, not only because of Mendenhall but because so many of his staff members—including assistant coaches Anae, Nick Howell, Kelly Poppinga, Mark Atuaia, Jason Beck, Shane Hunter and Garett Tujague—also made the move to Charlottesville from Provo. Anae, Beck, Poppinga, Tujague and Hunter also played at BYU. It got people’s attention in the Mountain Times Zone when the Wahoos went out to Boise State and won big in 2017; they took notice again when Virginia won its Coastal Division title two years later.

As Edmonds put it, “I don’t think there’s any merit to any sort of criticism of Bronco.”

Gustavson had another analogy to explain why Mendenhall was initially so uncomfortable with the idea of returning to Provo as Virginia’s head coach.

“Think of your first love and seeing them again,” he described, “or some significant emotional experience.”

At 38 years old, Mendenhall was the second-youngest coach in the country when he was hired by BYU in 2005. As he mentioned on Monday, the school is still “near and dear to [his] heart.” Only a handful of his former recruits will still be in BYU uniforms on Saturday night, freeing the head coach of some of those emotions that had weighed him down previously.

There’s also a game to be played, between a pair of 6-2 teams. BYU already has four wins this season against Power 5 opponents for the first time ever; UVa’s visit is an opportunity at a fifth. The Wahoos will be playing for the program’s first five-game winning streak since 2007, and have players like quarterback Brennan Armstrong and receiver Dontayvion Wicks trying to maintain their own record-breaking paces under Anae.

Mendenhall’s stoic demeanor has always reminded Gustavson of Edwards, his former coach. He knows he will see that same disposition on Saturday, “but inside, it’ll be something special to walk out on the field where he represented the university for 11 years. I think that will mean something to him.”

That appreciation is expected to be reciprocated from the stands of LaVell Edwards Stadium. Bronco’s return has been a popular topic among BYU fans on social media. Former players have also been open in support of their one-time coach. Criddle, for one, is hoping for a standing ovation.

“I think the vast majority is going to welcome Bronco back happily,” said Lloyd. “Be happy he’s here, happy to have him and the staff back, and then hope their team goes out and crushes them on the field.”

Gustavson will be in that crowd welcoming Mendenhall back to BYU. He and his wife Kris Anne are flying to Provo from Hawaii on Friday to be in attendance. She recently asked which team he planned to root for on Saturday. He said it was an easy answer.

“Both teams I love. So how could I go wrong?” Gustavson replied. “I have no problem rooting for both teams because of what Bronco is doing and what BYU is doing. I love both teams. I consider it a win-win, whatever happens.”

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