The BYU men's rugby team welcomed the Weber State Wildcats to town and capped off Friday night with a 76-0 win, improving to 2-0 on the season.
Weber State went into the match looking for its first win of the season, but the Cougars kept the momentum from last week's victory rolling and put a quick end to those Wildcat wishes.
Weber State got possession to start the match, but they couldn't hold onto the ball for long and eventually turned it over. After a few moments searching for a weak spot in the defense, BYU was the first to find the end zone and put points on the board. The Cougars established field control and didn't give it back the rest of the match.
BYU didn't take long to extend the lead after Gavin Bell was able to muscle his way through multiple defenders and score the first of his two tries of the match.
"Our forwards did really well this time of being organized so they could draw in a lot of defenders," Bell said. "It's just knowing when the right time to spin it out wide is."
The match was physical, most of the time was spent up front in the trenches. But amid all the chaos, the Cougars would occasionally expose small gaps with bursts of speed. Ethan Nielsen had one such opportunity and was able to show off his wheels, making a run from midfield all the way to the end zone.
While the offensive scoring was exciting, the surprise for the night was the defensive effort by the Cougars. Weber State had plenty of opportunities to score, marching all the way to the try line multiple times. And yet each time they came knocking, the Cougars were there to slam the door.
"Tackling, tackling has been a huge thing," BYU's RJ Ashton said. "We've been really working on hitting low, wrapping up, and I felt like as a team we did that a lot better tonight."
In the last minutes of the match, Weber State had clawed its way toward the end zone in a last effort to get some points on the board. The Cougars made their greatest defensive stand of the match, and for five long minutes, they fought as if they themselves were losing the game. BYU came out on top after a forcing turnover and clearing the ball down the field, resulting in a roar from the crowd.
"We had a really good stand," BYU's Tommy Fowler said. "How you win is how you lose. There's gonna be a time where it won't be 70-0, and then we'll need to be making that stand. So play like you mean it, that's practice for when it really counts."
"I think we just gotta tighten up a couple areas," said BYU coach Steve St. Pierre. "We had too many penalties tonight. So just clean up those areas of the game and just come ready to play for a good opponent in Colorado State next week."
The Cougars will look to keep their humble, hungry mentality as they prepare to travel to Fort Collins next week and play the Colorado State Rams.