It's never been a perfect conjunction, this annual BYU Bowl in Las Vegas.

Take two disparate entities, slam them together, and that's what you get here, like atoms swirling in a supercollider, to explosive success. A sellout crowd in an erector-set of a football stadium that otherwise never sells out, on the edge of a town that garnered its fame via a suitcase full of honor-code violations, drawn in to watch a team made up primarily of returned missionaries and Eagle Scouts, fresh-faced players with milkshakes on their breath more than anything concocted over at the bar at the Pussycat Dolls Lounge.

An example of the awkward juxtaposition ...

What you are about to read includes two nouns that, guaranteed, have never before been put into the same sentence at the same time: Bronco Mendenhall and the Crazy Girls will be showing in Vegas on Tuesday night.

Not together. Just together in the same city.

More juxtaposition ...

The Cougars are staying this week at the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino on the Strip. You can hang out there, if you want to catch a glimpse of Max Hall wandering around with his teammates. Or, at the same resort, you can check out something called Peep Show, which, in one promotional blip, is described as ... "a new and innovative show," including "burlesque and sexy striptease, topless cabaret, and celebrity production -- an adult Vegas show that actually has a storyline."

That show's featured smokin'-hot character is Little Bo Peep, who, apparently, blossoms over a span of time from her shy, naïve self into a "sexy and daring woman with more confidence than before." And she's backed in the show by a bunch of talented, curvy, leggy dancers who use their bodies to enhance and augment that storyline in various degrees of undress.

Hmmm.

Tradition. Spirit. Honor. Oh, my.

Of course, the BYU football team and attendant entourage will have nothing to do with any of that. (Although, in past years, there are plenty of Cougar fans who have been spotted enjoying all sorts of venues, including the tables at casinos all around Las Vegas, decked out in blue garb. I saw one guy last year in a Quest For Perfection T-shirt downing a Bud and cranking the slots.) They are here to play and watch football, not concern themselves with distractions of any kind, let alone Bo Peep's ascending journey.

They've got their own to pursue and follow.

They are here to beat the Beavers.

This is the fifth straight year BYU has played in the Vegas Bowl, all five of them sold out. The Cougars previously defeated Oregon and UCLA at Sam Boyd Stadium, and they lost to Cal and Arizona.

Oregon State, then, is their rubber match.

And they seem to be taking it a little more seriously now than they have in the past. And they'd better, if they want to have any shot at winning. The Beavers are good, maybe, probably, the second-best team in the Pac-10. Which works out all nice and symmetrical since the Cougars are the second-best team in the Mountain West. OSU has an accurate quarterback with speed at the skill positions and the ability to put a lot of points on the board. The Cougars will have to out-scheme and outscore them.

As usual, BYU fans will overwhelm opposing fans here this week, most of them traveling in from out of state, some of them emerging from Las Vegas' own heavy LDS population.

That's a part of the city that many visitors never see -- its neighborhoods. Away from the Strip, Vegas looks a lot like other desert suburbs, with shopping centers bumping up against residential streets and golf courses winding through upscale developments with tile roofs spanning over the horizon.

Vegas isn't all about revues and shows, adult or otherwise, and night clubs and entertainment and gambling and debauchery. That stuff just lures in millions of visitors, and rolls up profits, boosting tax revenue enough to build a bunch of beautiful, spanking new schools for the locals, a good percentage of whom are decent people, some of them church-going types of almost all denominations, and some of them LDS Church members.

It's up to them -- and maybe you, too -- to decide whether they -- you -- want to go watch BYU play football or Little Bo Peep find her path in life, with nude dancers spinning around her, or perhaps both.

Either way, short of a BCS bowl berth, Vegas suits the Cougars fine.

It's their home away from home, even if it isn't perfect.

GORDON MONSON hosts the "Monson and Graham Show" weekdays from 2-6 p.m. on 1280 AM The Zone. He can be reached at gmonson@sltrib.com .