Gordon Monson: BYU defensive coordinator Jay Hill is surrounded by miracles, and grateful for them

The man could have died last football season, but instead he coached, kept coaching. What he didn’t do and what he did do both lean toward the miraculous. But there are a couple more miracles in Jay Hill‘s story, the lesser of the two being what he’s done to turn — to absolutely transform — BYU’s defense from what it once was into what it’s become. The other, the greater one, is tee’d up for later.

Stringing five amazing, astounding, astonishing words together is what it takes to put a wrap on all of it.

But hold on right there for just a moment. This is one of those offseason feature columns that could have been written at the start of BYU’s 11-2 season in 2024. Had it been written then, it might have been more timely, more prompt and punctual. Sitting on it for a bit, though, makes its reflection in the rearview all the more complete and remarkable.

The most significant part of that reflection is this: He’s aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive.

Jay Hill is alive.

He just returned from an exhaustive recruiting trip, the latest proof. The defensive coordinator is into his job, big time, and appreciative for the chance to do it. As Hill puts it, “I‘m grateful for life, but I‘m grateful for football, too.”

The latter never compromised the former. Not in his mind. The game he played and then coached for decades rarely rolled up on him and roiled his nerves, rarely stressed him out, never caused his synapses to break into a funk.

“Looking back, I don’t want to underplay it or overplay it,” says Hill, “but I don’t internalize pressure. It’s a weird deal.”

What’s weird is what most everyone now knows: Hill famously — or would it be infamously? — suffered and survived a heart attack on the Thursday before BYU’s 2024 season opener against Southern Illinois. He underwent procedures that night and on the following Saturday morning — game day — to clear blockages in his arteries and put stents in place to necessarily better the function of his heart.

Otherwise, he might have been wearing a headset and pacing up and down the sidelines on the verdant stretches somewhere out in the Great Beyond.

Hill had told his wife, Sara, a huge part of this narrative, a day before that he was feeling a bit strange. He had noticed on various previous occasions lightheadedness, but doctors’ tests had always determined his physical conditioning to be, as he says it, “better than average.”

“I always thought I was in great health,” he adds, “until I found out I wasn’t.”

Hill shrugged off his slight symptoms until the next day, when after a team practice, a weightlifting session with players, and during a haircut, his struggles worsened. He started sweating through his clothes, as though some unseen force had battered him, had dumped a bucket of water on him.

He later told ESPN that during that haircut, “I just started sweating so bad that the poor girl cutting my hair grabbed a towel, and she was wiping me off. I felt so embarrassed. And then she took the cape off me and my pants were just drenched. I was having a heart attack, and I didn’t know it. Right in the barber chair, I‘m having a heart attack.”

He reiterates now: “It was a crazy deal.”

Sara hurriedly drove him to a hospital in Orem on that Thursday, Aug. 29, as the physical signals intensified, and then were accompanied by chest pains. Doctors made a quick diagnosis and without hesitation did their dextrous work to rectify the situation, which is a rather dispassionate way of saying, they saved his life.

On Saturday, after the second procedure, as the defensive coordinator somehow was feeling both better and motivated to attend the opener at LaVell Edwards Stadium, he did exactly that, against doctors’ recommendations, although he did not take on his usual role of setting the defense, calling its plays down on the field. BYU head coach Kalani Sitake and linebackers coach Justin Ena handled those duties. Hill did provide information from the coaches’ booth, where Sara kept a close eye on him, monitoring, among other numbers and functions, his blood pressure and his general condition.

Surprisingly, when BYU played SMU just six days later, Hill says he was at the peak of his powers as a football coach, able to focus completely on the task at hand running the defense, able to foresee what the talented Mustangs were doing on offense and countering it with proper resistance: “Everything was so clear. We played lights out in that game.” Hill coached lights out, too, and he could sense it, after wondering whether he would ever fully come back from his health scare.

“After that, I knew I could do this, and do it at a high level,” he says. “I knew I was in a weird situation. But coaching actually helped me. I felt an extreme need to be on it.”

There were occasional setbacks. At certain junctures during a subsequent season that got more and more successful, as the Cougars stacked up nine straight wins, Hill was reminded of his own mortality, nudged by moments when his blood pressure spiked and he looked and felt — what’s the right word? — off. Yeah, that. The question of the day, of every and all days was this: How is a football coach, known for his acumen, but also his focus and intensity, supposed to reel in some of the aspects of his profession that made him what he was and is?

Part of the answer came via one substantial advantage: Hill knew and knows what he’s doing, and therefore almost never suffered or suffers the anxiety that comes by way of being ill-prepared. No brag there, just fact.

“I‘ve been around some really good defensive minds,” he says. “I‘ve got 50 yellow notepads of things Urban [Meyer] would say, Kyle [Whittingham] would say. I took tons of notes through the years and tried to be open to all football philosophies. I switched back and forth as a coach from defense to offense and offense to defense. Most assistants don’t get those opportunities. I watched film with Kyle and he memorized what an opponent would do. It took 20 years for me to learn to memorize like that and to match what I want my defense to do to stop it. …”

Hill hesitates, not wanting to boast.

“… I get it right way more than I get it wrong. If I don’t have a strong inclination about what’s coming next, I call for an all-around [scheme] that’s good against the run and the pass.”

His players sometimes are blown away by Hill’s uncanny ability to perceive what an opposing offense is up to next. They ask, “How do you know that?” He just smiles, and later whispers: “Even if I make a stupid call, the players believe it’s the right thing. There’s so much power in that.”

An example of Hill’s informed and comprehensive version of prescience came in the Alamo Bowl against Colorado. In that game’s first 15 defensive plays, BYU showed the Buffaloes 13 different looks, most of which were on the money. The DC gives his players much credit for being intelligent and prepared, saying he knew beforehand that the Cougars would play well in that game. They also could memorize and process film.

Hill’s wealth of accumulated knowledge stems from his playing days at Utah and later coaching alongside so many qualified mentors with the Utes, and thereafter as a head coach at Weber State, where he was able to put everything — all three phases, as coaches like to say — together. He built Weber football into a national powerhouse at the FCS level before joining Sitake’s staff as defensive coordinator in 2022. By then, his craft was mastered as a kind of football savant.

In Ogden, Hill worked wonders, transforming that program, too, bringing wins and pride to a school that lacked and needed both. At the helm there, Hill couldn’t have cared less that he wasn’t coaching at college football’s top level. To him, football was football, players were players, leadership from the coach’s office was about loving up athletes and teaching them how to not just win, but to have fun as victory was earned. He, himself, had learned that in numerous varieties from his aforementioned mentors and colleagues, guys like Ron McBride, Meyer, Dan Mullen, Whittingham, Sitake, Dennis Erickson, Gary Andersen, Morgan Scalley and Aaron Roderick.

For a time, he was concurrently the head coach of and the defensive coordinator for the Wildcats, articulating back then his football philosophy: “There are recipes for success. You can chuck it all over the field for 500 yards, but you end up 6-6. You win championships by playing defense, not turning the ball over, running the ball. I don’t mind throwing it, though. We build our success on the talents of our players. Each year is a little different. That’s deep in my roots.”

As is attention to detail, and proper absorption and application of what he sees and wants to implement, from technique to toughness. He’s certainly done exactly that at BYU. When he was still at Weber, before Sitake offered him a healthy paycheck to run the Cougars’ defense, a paycheck that has grown larger in recent times, Hill’s associate head coach with the Wildcats, Brent Myers, said this of his boss: “Jay is super-bright, super-detailed, super-organized. Everything we do, we do with purpose. … Plus, he’s got a relationship with every kid. He’s got a passion for the game and for the players. He loves the players. And they love him.”

Nowhere was that on greater display than when he awoke from lying flat on a surgeon’s table to arise and travel nearly directly from the hospital into the box at LES on Aug. 31 to do what he could to help get BYU off to a stellar start to a stellar season.

Amazing, astonishing, astounding enough.

Equally notable, though, is the evolution — no, the revolution — Hill has led in the defensive rooms of the Cougars’ practice facility. To reiterate, BYU’s defense reinvented itself under his view over the past couple of seasons. The year before he arrived in Provo, BYU’s resistance was a mess, in utter disarray. The Cougars finished near the bottom of almost every significant defensive category that season. They were a defense made of paper mache, a French word that translated literally means “chewed paper.”

Chewed paper the BYU defense is no more.

In 2024, the Cougars ranked atop the Big 12 in total defense, scoring defense and forced turnovers. They ranked 13th nationally in total D. They limited opposing quarterbacks to the third-lowest pass efficiency rating in the country. They allowed the fewest passing touchdowns in the conference. BYU also led the country in interceptions per game.

At the heart of it — apologies for a wickedly lousy pun — is … yeah, You-Know-Who. He dishes heart-felt praise — OK, enough already — to his assistants, as he should.

Still, anyone who has achieved what Hill has done at and for BYU would naturally attract the attention of other football programs eager to hire him as their head coach. He has resisted that lure, maybe in part because of the influence of Sara, who, given her husband’s recent brush with death, might like him to stay settled in at BYU in his current stable role.

Maybe he’s pulled back just slightly, maybe not.

Hill wants to be a head coach again, intends to be. “Do I want to be offered jobs?” he says. “Yes, I‘m an arrogant, confident guy. I wanted to be a head coach before and I want to do it again. I‘ve turned down crazy jobs in the past. But I love where I am now. My situation here is unbelievable.”

Which is to say, as he continues to build what he’s constructing on BYU’s defensive side, that is enough, at present. If the right head coaching job were to arise at the right place at the right time, he’d strongly consider taking it. He, though, can afford to be selective.

Coaching in that way is on his schedule, on his life plan, but so is living.

Hill was just 49 when his heart insisted on calling for immediate attention from a dude who might have thought, like a lot of folks do, that he’s immortal, with more than his share of amplified energy. Going forward, he is apt to listen to Sara — “the person I trust the most,” he says — when it comes to any personal or professional decisions — for good reason, considering what the couple has experienced in previous years. Sara is one of the miracles.

While Hill was coaching at Weber, in 2016, Sara had been diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma, a condition that mandated the better — or worse — part of two years of extreme treatments that shoved her to her physical, mental and emotional limits. Hill’s, too. They powered through that with strength and fortitude that wandered onto the edge of the unimaginable. So, Sara and Jay Hill are familiar not just with what it means to stare down their own individual mortality, to be run over and roughed up by it, but also to examine and lend support to one another’s, and thereby to accept and know with exactness what’s most important to them, and to cling to it with everything, every bit of force and firmness they possess.

Sara now is as healthy as she’s been in a long time. And Hill is full of admiration for her resilience. He considers his health challenge, at least as he experienced it, small compared to hers. They go on, then, pursuing and embracing life with their children, and, in the case of Jay, chasing excellence on the one side — really, on all sides — of BYU football.

If Cougar players need reminding what it takes and means to persevere, to push and to keep on pushing through to the other side of victory, no matter how high or how low the win percentages are in the first or fourth quarters of a game, or of life, they can look at their defensive coordinator and also at his wife for good guidance, for a clear image of the resolve required.

That picture is powerful. No plethora of truthful words — not a thousand of them — need to be spoken, or spewed in coach-speak, not even six meaningful ones contracted into five they’d likely never let stir in their minds, nor cross their lips.

“Look at us, we’re here.”