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SALT LAKE CITY — Keep it alive, now and always.
No, this is not a sappy lyric in a cheesy love song. It pertains to the rivalry between Utah and BYU, a football series that needs to live on for years to come.
For different reasons, continuing the series benefits each team. For the fans, most of them on both sides want it.
As an independent, faced with more difficulty trying to find opponents, BYU needs the game for scheduling purposes. An extended contract with Utah, similar to the Boise State series, creates one less open week that athletic director Tom Holmoe and his successors have to fill.
But this series is far more than another game for the Cougars, who often play a string of faceless and nameless opponents every season. BYU needs more familiar foes, like teams in conferences have multitudes of each year.
Unlike its counterparts at the professional level, college football is built upon rivalries, which can only occur over decades of competition. Seven years into the Pac-12, the Utes are building those rivalries annually with the other five teams in the conference’s South Division.
Rivalries, even if it is not against one singular team, create passion among the players and fan base. And passion creates enemies, the factor that separates college from the NFL.
As fun as it was for BYU to beat Michigan State last season in East Lansing, the game had no lasting enjoyment beyond one win. Nor did it have any potential storylines to carry over from one season to the next.
BYU has built a nice regional rivalry with Boise State, with the two teams playing several exciting games as part of their ongoing 12-year contract. It would serve both programs well to negotiate another long-term deal.
Good for the Cougars for playing Boise State and Utah State every season. But nothing matches the intensity of playing Utah.
The Cougars can schedule — and maybe even occasionally beat — all the big-name opponents they want. Those games are fun, particularly if it is part of a home-and-home series, but all Cougars always point north to Utah.
“People say you treat it like another game, but it’s not,” said BYU coach Kalani Sitake, who willingly departs from former coach Bronco Mendenhall’s belief. As part of rivalry lore, Sitake joins Utah coach Kyle Whittingham as having played for the Cougars and worked for Utah.
The one-sided nature of the rivalry, the Utes have won the last six games against BYU, only adds to the intrigue. Coming off one of the worst offensive performances of the program’s history in a loss to LSU, the Cougars will try to break the streak on Saturday night in LaVell Edwards Stadium.
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The BYU football team won't be at full strength when they host rival Utah at 8:15 p.m. MT Saturday, with suspensions and possible injuries to keep an eye on.Although the game is not as important to them as it is to BYU, the Utes also benefit from playing the game. By keeping BYU on the schedule, they join USC as the only two Pac-12 programs that have two traditional rivalries every season.
The Trojans play crosstown rival and South Division foe UCLA each November, rotating between the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Bowl. They also play Notre Dame, with the away game always in October and the home game in November.
Certainly, any of Utah’s conference games mean more than beating BYU. By the same token, a rivalry win is better than beating most any other Power 5 team in a non-conference game.
Those trying to diminish BYU’s stature like to argue that it meant more to Utah to beat Michigan twice the last three years. Phooey.
Try naming the last time Utah fans stormed the field three times in a single game as they did in that bizarre ending in the win over BYU in 2012. Current members of the team, who only know BYU as a non-conference opponent, also brim with anticipation of playing the rivalry game in a stadium that is always filled to capacity. Dominating their rival also gives the Utes a decided advantage over BYU with in-state recruits.
In the end, the series is too good to discontinue.
“I love football, and this rivalry is a big part of it,” Sitake said. “It’s one of the best games in the country."
