BYU has named its starting quarterback. BYU has its quarterback.
Those are two distinct sentences that Kalani Sitake hopes merge into one and the same. It’s tough to say whether they will. Sitake learned a lesson long ago about presuming anything when it comes to what is named and what is.
“The quarterback is like any other position,” he once told me. “The job has to be earned and deserved.” And retained.
What is earned and deserved today can be lost and relinquished four weeks from now. It’s a fickle, results-oriented deal, this starting quarterback business.
Not sure that will happen with or be the fate of Bear Bachmeier, but it could. Offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick isn’t of the mindset to forfeit an entire season for the sake of blessing one next time around. He owes it to the veterans on the 2025 team to give them the best chance of winning now.
Leave development to the tanking pros who can reset through the draft while all the proven players cash in on their multi-year contracts. The money in college is substantial these days, and the players do reap their modern benefits. But college players are prospects in a hurry, in a rush to demonstrate not just their skills, but their ability to win, their status as winners. Moreover, the time to enjoy being BMOC is today. If the Cougars don’t win, big men look considerably smaller. And so do coaches.
What defensive coordinator Jay Hill said the other day was and is not just a bold statement, it was and is a proclamation full of admirable coaching accountability. When talking about what he looks for in recruits, he said: “I look for ceiling, what is the ceiling that we can get that guy to. And then our job is to get him there. … It’s our job to put [athletes] to where they can be efficient.”
Sitake, Roderick and others were careful — maybe even hesitant — in naming Bachmeier, the transfer freshman who hadn’t even been a part of spring practices. He traversed a large chasm over a short span, albeit a period of unexpected emergency in which a quarterback, the most important single quality in a football program, had to be established. That circumstance might have hurt Bachmeier as much as helped him, with coaches, ordinarily at least, liable to lean toward what is more familiar to them.
But that caused/necessitated more intense study of not just what Bachmeier could one day be, but what he already is. Even though BYU’s schedule toughens as it moves forward — and in truth is straight easy in the initial weeks — an early loss or string of unexpected losses, will blow a hole in a follow-up to the success the Cougars had last season.
Convincing it is that Sitake and Roderick selected Bachmeier because they believe the kid really is their best option, that he earned it by outperforming the others, as mentioned, in the here and now, not en route to some future, somewhat obscured date. That latter idea might be a notion worth some consideration, but not a primary one. Players who have practiced with these quarterbacks every day know which one is most able and prepared to reel in victory, and they would feel betrayed if the coaches were booby-trapping the ’25 season for whatever’s to come in 2026.
On the other hand, even if coaches have forgotten more about football than most others know, what they’ve seen thus far might be wrong. How a young quarterback will respond in live action, with extraordinarily large grown men with harmful intentions creating havoc all around him, with 65,000 fans loaded into the stadium, is, regardless of how good the teenager looked in practice, a crapshoot.
Bachmeier has been impressive without all the commotion. How will he be with it?
If he struggles, then other questions arise. For instance, if he makes careless mistakes against Portland State in the opener and Stanford the following week, both games in the friendly confines, and BYU wins, anyway, do you simply forge ahead, expecting those errors and living with them, hoping they evaporate in time? East Carolina is a game BYU would expect to win even though it’s set to be played 2,234 miles away in an unfriendly environment, and that’s to be followed by a trip to Boulder against Colorado. How much space — and forgiveness — does Roderick give Bachmeier as he gets — or fails to get — acclimated? West Virginia is in Provo, Arizona on the road.
Then comes Utah at LaVell’s Place, Iowa State and Texas Tech on the road.
By that point, or even in the previous weeks, if the quarterback’s naming and being have reached no confluence, BYU will be fortunate to make a bowl game. Where exactly is the point of no return?
Sure, the Cougars are expecting both their defense and their run game to greatly aid Bachmeier through his early education, but if the lessons begin to beat up the freshman, at what juncture is he no longer left to absorb them? How much can the team, as a whole, endure?
One reason the naming of Bachmeier is so risky and consequential, as opposed to going with, say, McCae Hillstead, is that very thing: If he’s not quite ready, how much damage will be inflicted on him en route to crossing that threshold to readiness? Even with the supposedly easy start, and with help from his teammates and other phases, will the stumbles and bumbles ruin him? And if he is pulled, what happens to the guys deemed inferior to him if and when they face the more difficult stretch of the schedule?
It’s all part of the fog bank that has rolled into Provo. True freshmen quarterbacks, traditionally at least, get kicked around in their rookie seasons, and in a whole lot of cases so do their teams.
If Bachmeier bucks that trend, which he has the chance, fat or slim, to do, he’ll be an exception. Still, he doesn’t have to be exceptional, not with the team that’s taking shape around him. Jake Retzlaff, coming off a sophomore season when, in the games he played, he treated the ball like a cache of heated nitroglycerin, frequently turning it over, wasn’t great as a junior, even as the Cougars went 11-2. He made plays, but he also made mistakes and, statistically, he was an average Big 12 quarterback.
Can Bachmeier be average or slightly above? If he can, as long as he steps up in occasional moments of need, his naming will have been not just on point, but downright prophetic. BYU, then, will have its quarterback. The distinct sentences will converge in one name … yeah, Bear Bachmeier.