You could be forgiven for doing a double take this summer when roaming BYU’s idyllic campus nestled beneath the Wasatch Mountains and seeing a Bear and a Tiger standing around together near the side of the road.
One is tall and slender with cat-like reflexes and flowing locks. The other is stocky but surprisingly agile and quite a load when coming downhill at you. Neither is the type you call animal control over, but rather just the brothers Bachmeier waiting for their ride as they adjusted to life in Provo, Utah, ahead of preseason camp.
“We were Ubering everywhere at first when we got here because we didn’t have our car here yet,” recalls Tiger Bachmeier with a chuckle. “At Stanford, it’s a huge campus but I had a bike. So it was weird having to sell off our bikes and show up on our feet.”
The two former Cardinal players each went through spring football on the Farm earlier this year and were quite content remaining there, playing together in their home state at a school they picked as the perfect fit coming out of Murrieta Valley High in Southern California. Tiger, a junior receiver/returner, is the elder of the two and was already an established starter on the team, while Bear, a true freshman, was in firm contention to play right away after stepping into a quarterback battle with inexperienced players.
That was the plan anyway, right up until the program fired head coach Troy Taylor in March over allegations of bullying and NCAA violations. That prompted an unexpected detour to the transfer portal for Bear and—after a few extra days considering the matter—Tiger to do the same.
The brothers certainly landed on their feet at BYU, both in their own way and, also, together as one. They’re playing a key role in getting their new program to 6–0, rising to No. 15 in the AP poll, and back in the thick of Big 12 contention for the second straight year ahead of a meeting with in-state rival Utah on Saturday.
Tiger is part of the rotation in a veteran receiving corps and has had touches running the ball, catching it and returning punts so far in 2025. Bear leads all true freshmen FBS quarterbacks this season in passer rating, yards per attempt and completion percentage, the latter stat just ahead of preseason all-conference pick Sam Leavitt of Arizona State and with the same percentage as Iowa State veteran Rocco Becht. The Cougars starter has garnered Big 12 weekly honors four times in his first six games after becoming the first true freshman to start the opener under center in school history.
Bear has turned into something of a cult hero, owing partly to his position as the team’s starting signal-caller but just as much—if not more—to his unique look barrelling down the field to pick up first downs and ripping off big gains in the, well, No. 47. He’s the team’s second-leading rusher (295 yards) behind the similarly sized LJ Martin and is not far off the national lead with his seven rushing touchdowns on the season, a sight to behold while wearing a jersey far from usual for a player at his position.
“When I started playing football, my dad picked it for me. I used to play running back and middle linebacker,” Bear says of his number. “I just kept in when I made the transition to quarterback.”
“I think this whole story around him being a fullback is pretty accurate,” adds Tiger. “I honestly think that it was just a misprinted jersey and it was the only one that would fit him. Then he just stuck with it and then stuck with the rest of the story because he doesn’t really have a reason for why he started with 47. It didn’t ever cross our minds that it was a weird number. It wasn’t until social media got big and he started to do big things in sophomore, junior year of high school that college coaches said 47 is kind of weird [for a quarterback], ‘Are you going to wear that?’ I think that he started to realize that it was unique then.”
NCAA rules don’t prohibit the number’s usage, only vaguely stating in the most recent rulebook that “it is strongly recommended” that backs—halfback, quarterback, fullback—wear a number between 0 and 49.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame has just three players enshrined with the number in corner Mel Blount, safety John Lynch and lineman Duke Slater. None came close to touching the ball as much as Bachmeier does regularly as a quarterback, though you can at least see some similarities in how the latest to wear the number plays with toughness, physicality and a refusal to let a play go between the lines.
Whatever its beginnings, 47 is clearly working out for Bachmeier just as much as the young Bear is working out for BYU after being a surprise addition to the quarterback battle during camp.
The Cougars came into the year expecting incumbent Jake Retzlaff to be the starter after he went 11–2 with the team in 2024 while throwing for 2,947 yards and 20 touchdowns. Yet a sexual assault lawsuit, later dismissed, eventually led to his departure for Tulane in mid-July after the school planned to suspend him for multiple games for a violation of the school’s honor code.
That thrust Bachmeier into a battle for the starting job almost from the moment he stepped on campus.
Though he entered with less of a grasp of the offense and zero college experience, Bachmeier eventually won the trust of the coaching staff over veterans Treyson Bourguet and McCae Hillstead, who each started at their previous schools.
“I just attacked it the way I was raised. My dad always tells me a quote and it’s, ‘Attack life.’ Life isn’t going to wave at you, so you gotta attack it,” Bear says. “Luckily, an opportunity arose and I just went with it.”
It helps to have a family to lean on in such stressful situations, which the Bachmeiers did quite a bit as things got upended from their path at Stanford.
Bear and Tiger quickly picked up the BYU playbook together and would often quiz each other on it when away from the field, with the former strumming his guitar on occasion (“Wagon Wheel” being the go-to, for those asking) when he needed a break from the extended studying. The dedication paid off as Bear got onto the same page with his new set of receivers.
“Every day in practice it just feels more comfortable. Sometimes guys will be like, ‘When Bear scrambles he throws the ball in this certain spot,’ ” says Tiger, who played a season with his brother in high school. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot he did that.’ Or I knew he did that but just didn’t realize that because it’s a natural thing. You really don’t realize the chemistry until other people point out the chemistry that they don’t have with him yet. So that’s been fun.”
Eldest brother Hank—there’s also an older sister, Ella, and youngest brother, Buck, as part of the close-knit clan—even contributed where he could with tips, pointers and advice having been a starting quarterback himself at Boise State, Louisiana Tech and last year at Wake Forest.
“He’s been such a great role model and such a great asset to have,” Bear says of Hank, who recently became a father. “He’s played college football for six years. The amount of knowledge he has, and just how much he’s passing down to me, it’s just special. I just love learning so much from him.”
The current Bachmeier signal-caller still has a learning curve to get to where he wants to be with the Cougars. After not throwing an interception in August and September, he’s thrown three in BYU’s last two games and completed just 41% of his passes against Arizona (though he did lead the team to a double-overtime victory on the road from being down double-digits). That’s not quite the trend everybody was hoping for going into a game against a Utes defense which is allowing just 13.8 points per game and has 16 sacks.
“When you’re a freshman, every single game he’s having experiences happen for the first time. As those experiences accrue, you gain growth,” BYU offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick said. “We’re still growing with him. He had a couple of mistakes [vs. Arizona] that are first-time things and he just has to keep growing. There will be some more things this game [vs. Utah] that he hasn’t seen before.
“He’s a mature kid for a young guy. I’m impressed with how unbothered he is for any situation.”
That’s something the rest of the team has picked up on, with the fresh-faced quarterback being unfazed by such mistakes on the sidelines after throwing those two picks. According to Tiger, it’s simply in Bear’s nature not dwell on the past but instead focus on what’s ahead.
That was the case this week in practice ahead of the team’s biggest game to date, the aptly named Holy War against nearby Utah, which has been so fierce in recent meetings that the two university presidents even recorded an ad on local television this year encouraging fans to “rivalry right” on Saturday.
It will be the Bachmeiers’ first exposure to the contest, which they each are looking forward to more for the opportunity. The winner will not only get to keep its College Football Playoff hopes alive another week but will likely, alongside Texas Tech, be favored to make it to Arlington, Texas, for the Big 12 championship game.
“I think I’ve been involved in it 21 times as a player or coach. I think I counted nine or 10 of those came down to the last possession or last play—so about half the time. It’s a huge game, the whole state’s into it,” added Roderick. “It’s a tricky thing. Both of us know each other so well. I compare it to a Game 7 of an NBA Finals, where you know each other so well that the last game is just like, We know that they know that we know, kind of things. You can outsmart yourself sometimes so the players just have to go out and make plays and execute.”
BYU didn’t really expect to have a Bachmeier, much less two of them, out there making such plays against the Utes.
The Cougars are more than happy that’s the case now as they walk into LaVell Edwards Stadium this weekend armed with the rare combination of a Tiger and a Bear that do more than get along on the football field.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Unlikely Duo Powering BYU Football’s Perfect Season: A Bear and a Tiger.