Bob Judson, Special to the Daily Herald

PROVO — BYU football traveled to Boise State to begin November and the Cougars finally put together their first complete-game performance in over a month, coming from behind in dramatic fashion to nip the Broncos 31-28 in the final two minutes.

BYU players on both sides of the ball could never have taken the field to compete without the clutch performances of Hal Morrell and Fili Taufa.

Morrell and Taufa are the BYU football equipment truck drivers. Though not on the team roster, they’re a pair of prominent people behind the scenes. They have delivered the goods for BYU football road games 74 times, successfully traversing some 175,000 miles over the past 11 years.

“Fili, he’s the guy that once we get to the town we’re playing in, he does all the driving,” Morrell said. “I’m real good at driving straight, but if there’s anything that needs backing up or getting into tight spots, he takes care of all that.”

Morrell and Taufa met Josh Hewitt, BYU’s director of football equipment operations, and his crew at Albertsons Stadium in Boise the day before the game with a supply of game helmets, jerseys, pants, cleats, pads, footballs, and communications equipment for the coaches — just like the tag-team tandem has done in relative anonymity since 2011.

Brett Pyne, BYU Athletics

Sure, there have been times when the blue-and-white truck got noticed, like when they drove south through Iowa after the Cougars had upset No. 6 Wisconsin in 2018.

“As we traveled home after the game, we went through Iowa City (home of the University of Iowa) and every car that passed us was honking, giving us the thumbs up, because BYU had beaten one of their big rivals,” Morrell said. “On the other hand, Oregon fans were flipping us off after our game earlier this year.”

But the dynamic duo achieved rock-star status in the pandemic season of 2020 with a well-documented, early December race against the clock.

BYU was looking for a quality opponent and there was a chance the team could schedule a game on the East Coast, so Morrell and Taufa left after 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, headed for Omaha, with the possibility they would have to turn around and come home empty-handed, so to speak.

“The story began for me when I got out of the temple a little after 3 o’clock and noticed I had a voicemail from Billy Nixon (former equipment director). I called Billy and he said ‘how soon can you be ready for a game?'” Morrell said. “(Nixon) said ‘we need you to be ready to go tonight.’

Bob Judson, Special to the Daily Herald

“I said, ‘where are we going?’ and Nixon said, ‘you’re going east.’ I said, ‘can you give me an idea? East, that’s from Maine to Miami. That’s a big area.’

“He said, ‘we need to have you head toward the Carolinas after practice tonight, but I can’t tell you where you’re going. There’s a chance you may get in your truck and take off and we may tell you after a thousand miles to turn around and come back,'” Morrell said. “I was in the driver’s seat just after 9 p.m., ready to leave and one of the equipment kids came out, jumped in front of the truck and said, ‘you can’t leave yet. We don’t have any game balls loaded!'”

Morrell drove until somewhere in Nebraska and by the time he and Taufa got to Omaha, the Cougars had inked a contest with Coastal Carolina for Saturday. They continued their 2,200-mile trek to Conway, South Carolina, a 40-hour direct shot, arriving a mere three hours before the team plane.

Along the way, Taufa was confident the game would happen.

“I told Hal, we’re going to have a game,” he said. “We pulled out of (BYU), changed drivers and talked to some newspapers and TV who called to us while we were driving.”

Bob Judson, Special to the Daily Herald

Morrell texted their progress, which was put on a Twitter account, and thousands of fans tracked the truck over the internet — not unlike the following Santa Claus gets from NORAD on Christmas Eve.

The tracker, under BYU Equipment Truck, has remained active ever since and Morrell started a Twitter account on the trip to Baylor last year, responding to questions as often as he can.

More recently, the Cougars opened the 2022 season with a game against South Florida at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, a 2,346-mile, 41-hour jaunt through 10 states.

“The first night isn’t so bad,” Morrell said. “It’s the second night that makes it really difficult.”

He pounded Monster drinks and 5-Hour Energy shots on the trip back to stay alert and paid the price for it, lamenting, “I don’t think my body was used to that much caffeine, so every 30 minutes I had to stop and go to the bathroom.”

Meanwhile, Taufa can hold his own and says most of the time he drinks “water, or maybe once a Pepsi or Diet Coke.”

Most trips start late after practice and there are no built-in rest stops except for breakfast that next morning “to get something good in us,” unless it’s a shorter trip like to Oregon. Dinner is usually a quick stop at a McDonald’s.

Otherwise, the pair drives straight through, alternating nine- to 11-hour shifts, and then trying to sneak some shuteye on a “fairly comfortable bed” in the back.

“I drive till I’ve had enough, but I struggle to sleep unless I’m really tired. Two hours in a stretch is a lot,” Morrell said. “You’re riding in a truck and every bump in the road, every seam in the concrete, just shakes and vibrates you.”

Taufa, on the other hand, was raised in Tonga, sometimes sleeping on cement floors and hard straw mats, so he finds the bed quite adequate.

“When I grew up, most of the time, I could lay down and sleep anywhere,” he said. “When we change drivers, I go back and just knock myself out; eight hours or 10 hours.”

This season, there have been trips to Eugene, Oregon; Las Vegas to play Notre Dame; and Lynchburg, Virginia, to play Liberty. Morrell and Taufa headed on the final road trip of the regular season this week, heading to Palo Alto, California, for the Cougars to take on Stanford.

BYU regularly travels the most miles of any FBS team in the country, with the exception of Hawaii. Morrell estimates that he and Taufa have traveled through 43 of the 50 states during their tenure on the road.

Comparatively, the short shot to Boise was a pretty simple trip, albeit every bit as important as having the truck on site for every other road game.

The operation is powered by a new 2022 Freightliner tractor with a 200-gallon fuel capacity and a range of 800 miles (do the math for miles per gallon). The trailer is a 45-footer with a tuckaway liftgate, weighing 6,500 pounds fully loaded.

Hewitt and his staff packed the trailer early Thursday the week of the Boise State game at the Student Athletic Building with all the essentials, including separate crates for the game helmets and uniforms.

The players’ personal gear (shoulder pads, cleats, etc.) was in individual bags stowed in three large, blue plastic bins measuring three feet deep, six feet high and four feet wide — on wheels, loaded last. Then Taufa, who lives in Orem, hooked up the tractor to the trailer and off he went at 6:30 p.m.

After Taufa embarked north, he made a detour to pick up Morrell, who resides in Centerville. Following a quick stop at Flying J in Ogden to top off the tanks (160 gallons, $860), Taufa drove directly to the Grove Hotel in Boise, arriving shortly after 1 a.m. Friday.

“We have things on the truck they need to set up at the hotel, equipment that the offensive and defensive groups need to sit down and view film — projectors, camera gear, plus medical stuff for the trainers,” Morrell said. “They like to have things there before hand so they can jump right in and go through their routine.”

Hewitt and an entourage of eight student managers flew in on the team charter, arranged a van at the airport, then met the truck at Albertsons Stadium around 5 p.m. Friday to unload the equipment not needed at the hotel.

There is not a dock at the stadium, so equipment was unloaded at the south end and moved directly into the locker room. It was raining, so the field gear was left on the trailer until Saturday morning.

“The biggest thing we put on the truck is the “comms” — the communication system that handles the reporting on the sidelines to the coaches in the press box — so that no one can pirate what’s going on unless you have a headset tied into it,” Morrell said.

The truck was left at the stadium until after the game. The AV equipment from the hotel was loaded on team buses Saturday morning, then offloaded at the stadium.

After the game, Morrell, Taufa, Hewitt and crew loaded the blue bins — not as neatly packed as before the game — back into the trailer where they were strapped in for the trip home.

Morrell pulled out of the Albertsons Stadium parking lot for the drive home at 9:45 p.m. and turned the truck over to Taufa when he got to Centerville around 2:30 a.m. (or 1:30 a.m. MST, confusing to track as they finished the trip during the time when clocks are set back one hour at the end of Daylight Saving Time).

Taufa caught a nap in the “fairly comfortable bed” on the way from Boise, so he was well-rested when he hopped in the driver’s seat for the closing miles back to the Student Athletic Building in Provo.

When the truck is not on the road, it makes appearances at fan festivals and has participated in make-a-wish type events for people in their twilight days — as well as offering a ride to this reporter on the trip to Boise, Idaho.

Word got out about the truck’s location near Liberty a few weeks before the Boise trip, and four local missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints converged for an eventful photo opp in Roanoke, Virginia, that went viral.

Morrell was touched by the event and texted about it to his wife, Carol, but somehow that message found the inbox of one of the missionary’s parents. It is a gentle, heartfelt reminder of how the truck has touched the lives of so many people over the years.

“That truck is more than a truck! That truck represents all the games we’ve watched together as a family, all the times we’ve been at a game, the new BYU shirts on Christmas morning, the countless stuffed animals, the time looking at stats and players, the old games we’ve rewatched and flag-flying in our yard,” Morrell texted. “That truck represents the Cougar tradition of our family and for a missionary away from home, that is everything. That truck is special … and for the record, I have been crying this morning!!”

To be clear, Morrell was emotional about the missionary experience on the road, not BYU football’s puzzling performance in a loss against Liberty on the field.

Newsletter