Analysis: New BYU athletic director Brian Santiago extends an olive branch to his detractors.
Amidst all the hugging, backslapping and talk of the vision, unity and unparalleled success of BYU’s athletic department the past few years, there was an elephant in the room, for lack of a better description, Wednesday morning in the BYU Broadcasting Building.
The issue is this: Brian Santiago, BYU’s longtime deputy AD who was just picked to replace legendary outgoing athletic director Tom Holmoe, has been a polarizing figure in the BYU athletic department for more than a decade.
His promotion, as much as a no-brainer as it seems to be, has not been unanimously viewed as a positive development within BYU’s worldwide fanbase and even the halls of the Student Athlete Building, especially when compared to Holmoe’s hiring in 2005.The former fiery point guard at Utah Valley State College (now UVU) and Fresno State has developed his fair share of detractors over the past couple of decades in Provo.
Of course, Santiago knows this. It’s no secret. That’s why he called it a “great question” when he was asked in a media scrum after the televised portions of his news conference about it, and offered a heartfelt, sincere answer.
“I would just say to people, ‘Let’s go on this journey together, and the more that we can interact with each other, the more you see who I really am as a person,’” Santiago said.
Santiago didn’t apologize for his style, but he did remind reporters that he is not the same person he was when he began his career at BYU in 1997 by joining Steve Cleveland’s basketball coaching staff.
He is not even the same guy who publicly jawed with a prominent WCC basketball coach near press row a decade ago in the Marriott Center.
“We are who we are, and I feel like I can stand with confidence in who I am. I think that part of my competitive nature came with me when I was born into this world,” he told the Deseret News. “But what I would say to those people (not on board) is that I can’t wait to get to know them better, and they are going to see that I am not the same person now that I was 27 years ago.”
To this reporter, that was evident last November at the end of the BYU-Arizona State football game in Tempe, as ASU students stormed the field twice, taunted BYU’s players and coaches, and created an ugly scene that tested the patience of every person on the Cougars’ sideline, including Santiago and Holmoe
