BYU is about to be sold the bill of goods Utah was sold some 12 years ago.
A league rivalry with Colorado. Pppfffwww.
That’s right, BYU versus the Buffs, the Cougars versus Colorado, the Battle for the Top of the Rockies. The only two conference schools in the Mountain time zone, for the time being anyway, are about to be strong-armed into being football rivals, Big 12-style.
Just as was the case for the Utes in the Pac-12, there are complications involved in that, some of them natural, most of them man-made.
Let’s back up for a minute and get a running start at this.
People around here — at least the ones favoring crimson, not so much the darkest shade of royal blue — cheered and partied the day Utah was invited into the Pac-12. That included the crowd on hand in a large suite at Rice-Eccles Stadium, as the band played, red-and-white balloons floated, league and school and local government officials spoke, a Rose Bowl representative handed the Utes a bouquet of red blossoms, and the future of Utah athletics, especially football, was made more promising.
The supercharged mood on that occasion, inside the state’s two biggest fan bases, each of which had hungered so long not just for recognition and respect for their school, but for opportunity, was dynamic. Utah wasn’t just alive, it was on fire. And BYU was … well, dead and dragging anchor, envious that its longtime rival was being granted what it thought it deserved.
As it turned out, while the Utes celebrated, BYU spun away from the Mountain West, heading into the challenging and foggy world of independence.
It was made to seem as though Utah didn’t need BYU anymore. The school that for more than a century had been a centerpiece of delight to defeat was now a sidepiece. OK, so maybe it wasn’t that, but it was happily downgraded and degraded to rival also-ran status.
And even as some Utah fans took great satisfaction in reminding the Cougars that they were unimportant to the Utes’ now-altered, now-elevated goals, they still lacked what every college team and fanbase craves — a hated opponent, an opponent against whom even the thought of losing stirs headache, heartache, and every manner of bodily dysfunction.
The Pac-12, inside more than a decade of miscalculations, decided that new Utah rival would be … You-Know-Who.
It never happened.
Not really. Not in football and not in any other sport.
There were chances for the Ute-Buff nastiness to stir. In both schools’ first year in the Pac-12, Utah had an unlikely shot at qualifying for the league’s football championship game. If it beat a lousy Colorado team in the final game of the regular season, played at Rice-Eccles, it could have qualified. But … the Buffs romped in and romped over the Utes … well, there wasn’t much romping of any kind on the field in an uninspired contest, which Colorado won, 17-14.
That victory ended the Buffs’ school-record 23-game road losing streak, and that general state of ineptitude was what dampened what might have otherwise developed. Instead, Utah fans, right from jump, looked at any kind of loss to Colorado as a monumental, self-inflicted failure, not as a reason to get mad at the other guys.
In the subsequent 11 seasons, the Utes have gone 10-1 against the Buffs, the most recent match a 63-21 head-in-helmet slapping in Boulder. Not a lot to conjure emotion in any of that. Speed bumps don’t make good rivals.
In this bust of a rivalry, then, it hasn’t been Utah’s fault. The Utes never engaged with CU over such an unbalanced short-run, turning their attention instead to folks like the USC Trojans, a team worth beating. That, for them, was fun.
As Colorado transitions in 2024 to the Big 12, maybe it can hold up its end of the deal against the other guys on the other side of the Rockies. With the hiring of Coach Prime, and all the bluster that comes with it, perhaps there will be substance, too, a wicked combination.
Even if there is, there’s another challenge in the development of a proper BYU-CU rivalry. Namely, that Colorado is returning to its old environment, a league which the Buffs had been a part of for a half-century prior to their bolting for the Pac-12. In bolting back, they reestablish old connections with former league rivals, so how dialed into BYU they will be is in question.
Natural opposition, resistance, does already exist between these two schools, stuff like BYU being a conservative, honor-code-injecting, personal-liberty-restricting, milkshake-slurping, heaven-seeking institution and Colorado being a progressive, expanded-thinking, boundary-blurring, Coors-drinking, hell-raising one. That could spice things up, adding to the dust-ups over which of the schools’ stadiums is in the prettier setting and which side of the Rockies has the best slopes and snow.
Still, skepticism exists about the prospects for a legitimate rivalry here.
If they take turns beating each other on the field, the regional thing could bump the matchup out of the ordinary. But, failing that, if neither of the two surface at or near the top of the Big 12 anytime soon, which is a good bet, Colorado-BYU will be just another game, nobody especially highlighting who sits atop the mountains between them.
