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Oxford, Miss. • BYU football players Jake Heaps and Kyle Van Noy are best friends, a relationship forged when the highly touted prep stars were being recruited by the Cougars, and steeled when Van Noy spent some time living with Heaps' family.
Now Van Noy can say his good buddy owes him one.
After the BYU quarterback threw a pick-six to put the team in a deep hole, the Cougars' sophomore linebacker rescued Heaps by stripping Ole Miss quarterback Zack Stoudt in the fourth quarter and falling on the ball in the end zone. The play lifted the Cougars, offensively inept for all but the final quarter, to a 14-13 win over the Rebels in front of 55,127 fans and a national television audience on Saturday.
"I just got lucky, that's all it was," Van Noy said after becoming the first Cougar since 1985 to score two defensive touchdowns, having earned one last year against Colorado State. "I tried to make something happen."
Justin Sorensen's PAT with 5:09 remaining gave the Cougars the one-point lead, and BYU held on to improve to 2-3 overall against SEC teams and avoid what was looking to be a slightly embarrassing loss against a team without its top running back, all-SEC performer Brandon Bolden, who went down early in the second quarter with an ankle injury and never returned.
But don't tell that to the Cougars.
"We're electrified in that locker room right now," Van Noy said. "Big game. Huge win."
But questions still abound, especially regarding new offensive coordinator Brandon Doman's offense, which came into the game having scored in 22 straight quarters — since Wyoming last year — and then promptly laid an egg the first three against the SEC's worst defense from a year ago.
"We made some mistakes," said Heaps, "like my turnover," which Ole Miss' Charles Sawyer returned 96 yards for a touchdown in the third quarter to give the Rebels a 10-0 lead.
"But for us to come down in their house and pull out the win like we did showed a lot of toughness and grit. That's ultimately what helped us get the win."
Heaps, who completed 24 of 38 passes for 225 yards and one touchdown with a 19-yard strike to Ross Apo, said last year's team wouldn't have won this game.
Offensive lineman Matt Reynolds said teammates rallied around Heaps after the interception, telling him they had his back.
"I loved our heart and the way we played," Reynolds said.
It was the biggest comeback win for BYU in the Mendenhall era, surpassing the 11-point deficit against New Mexico in his first year.
"It was a dead-even game," Mendenhall said. "It went all the way down to the end and was evenly played. It was an even match."
Actually, the Cougars dominated statistically, rolling up 316 yards to 208 for Ole Miss. The Rebels and their supposed best-in-the-nation offensive line had just 64 yards on the ground, and BYU ran 12 more plays and controlled the ball for more than nine more minutes.
"You can't take away what Ole Miss did defensively," Mendenhall said. "But we contributed by not having as clean of play as we would have liked. That kept some scores off the board."
Failures — including a missed chip-shot field goal by Sorensen — threatened to become costly.
Ole Miss had a first-and-10 at BYU's 11-yard line at the start of the fourth quarter, but BYU's defense stiffened and the Rebels had to settle for Bryson Rose's second field goal, a 29-yarder, and a 13-0 lead.
"There will be many things to point out that we could have done better, but we found a way to win the game," Mendenhall said.
Twitter: @drewjay —
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BYU has won its past four openers vs. FBS opponents by a combined nine points:
Year Score
2008 BYU 28, Washington 27
2009 BYU 14, Oklahoma 13
2010 BYU 23, Washington 17
2011 BYU 14, Ole Miss 13