Cougar Insiders

Cougar Insiders is a BYU athletics podcast built as a three-way conversation. Dick Harmon, a columnist for the Deseret News, sits with beat writers Jeff Call and Brandon Gurney, and in more than one episode the panel introduces itself from Thanksgiving Point. The format is simple. A result comes in, and the three of them argue about what it means. On the football side, the arguments start from losses. After a defeat to Northern Illinois, the panel turns to Kalani Sitake's week of talking to the media about consistency and sets that theme against Bronco, who is remembered as very consistent. The same discussion finds it odd to hear a directive like that in the middle of a season and asks what, specifically, will change. A slot-machine comparison credited to John Beck frames what to watch for after a quarterback change: consistency. A loss to Boise State in Boise brings play calling and the passion of BYU fans onto the agenda. So does the way social media has treated the coaching staff, and the panel asks outright whether the criticism aimed at Jeff Grimes is justified. Basketball gets some of the bluntest talk. After BYU gave up 113 points to Weber, a tweet from Gurney calling it hard to stomach comes up, and a New Year's Eve game from 2016, when that group of players were freshmen, is recalled as the moment the team looked ready to get markedly better. Losses to Pepperdine, Santa Clara and San Diego are held up against Gonzaga and St. Mary's, which rarely lose games like that. Volleyball gets a warmer turn, with a team chasing a national title and doing well without McKenna Miller. Coach audio is played into the conversation, not just summarized. In one clip Sitake says he would rather see players free to leave than stay while feeling forced, and the panel reads that as the stance of a player's coach. Recruiting inside Utah, bowl-game expectations and game predictions come up as well. The episode titles show how wide the net is: 'What's wrong with BYU basketball, right with BYU volleyball and new with Ty Detmer' sits alongside 'Trying to make sense of futile final series against the Broncos' and 'What can BYU fans expect in Zach Wilson's encore as a starter?' The talk is loose and quick, full of restarts and asides, and it tends to land on practical questions: what happened, why, and what it means for the next game. Sign-offs place the podcast alongside the newspaper and its website as another outlet for BYU coverage. It sounds less like a polished broadcast than like colleagues testing each other's takes: dry, sometimes frustrated, sometimes skeptical, and now and then warm about the program.