When it comes to covering the Cougars, no one has done it longer than Deseret News columnist Dick Harmon. He has written his stories through the lean years, the championship years, the independent years and currently BYU’s second year in the Big 12.

Through five weeks, no team has won more games than BYU (5-0), and the Cougars have catapulted from their low preseason Big 12 projections to a conference contender with a No. 17 national ranking.

Harmon is as surprised as anyone and has no idea how this story will end. However, for long-term success as a Power Four, he mentioned three specific challenges on the “Y’s Guys” podcast that the Cougars must address.

Here are his thoughts:

NO improvement

“NIL is here. There may be a salary cap, but there has to be some control over what happens. BYU needs to treat football’s NIL the same, and maybe not the same dollar-for-dollar, as basketball, but we’ve seen what basketball has done. Now that they have some NIL money in hand, they are going to go after some of the best basketball players in the world and get them.”

Pay coaches

“You have to keep guys like Jay Hill, whatever it takes. No need to go crazy, but you’re better off paying him more than he can get elsewhere as a defensive coordinator and maybe making his family feel so comfortable as a defensive coordinator and assistant head coach that he wants to stay here. You have to get coaches that you believe in, who are good and are productive and are good recruiters and produce, train and teach the players. You have to get them paid and keep them.

Latter-day Saint athletes

“BYU needs to do a much better job of signing, recruiting, pitching and grabbing Latter-day Saint athletes. The top ones, some of them come here, but a lot of them don’t. Kalani (Sitake) came to BYU known as a recruiter, but he has lost defensive linemen to Utah, USC and Oregon. He lost them, for whatever reason. So Kalani, as a personal challenge for him, has to turn that around and get those defensive linemen to want to come to BYU. I think if they compete for the Big 12 title, they’ll go a long way toward achieving that.

Dave McCann is a sportswriter and columnist for the Deseret News and is a play-by-play announcer and anchor for BYUtv/ESPN+. He co-hosts “Y’s Guys” at ysguys.com and is the author of the children’s book “C is for Cougar,” available at desertbook.com.