Rivalry. Holy war. Whatever you want to call it, the Utah-BYU football game is one of the most intense illustrations of human tribalism short of warfare.

It was not always thus. In the old days, the big Thanksgiving game and the huge in-state rivalry was Utah-Utah State, lately named the battle of the brothers. That series goes back to 1892, but will be on hiatus until 2012.

Utah and BYU didn't begin to tee it up against each other until 1896. They began playing annually in 1922, and for two decades the Y didn't win a game against the Utes. It's hard to have a rivalry when the same side always wins. When the Cougars rarely broke through, in 1942 and 1957, Ute fans were inconsolable.

You can credit the modern rivalry to LaVell Edwards, the avuncular BYU coach who turned that program into a national passing powerhouse. (BYU fans speak his name with a reverence just a tier below that reserved for Mormon prophets.) He also turned the rivalry decidedly in the Y's favor, going 15-1 against the Utes between 1972 and 1987. To cap the insult to Utah pride, BYU won a national championship during that run. The Cougars' success really made Ute fans sore, and the more the Cougars won, the more intense the feelings on both sides became.

Ute coach Ron McBride finally returned Utah to parity in the rivalry, Urban Meyer brought the Utes national respectability, and Kyle Whittingham has extended that. In recent years, the two teams have been fairly evenly

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matched, which has only fueled the fire.

Of course, there are religious overtones to the holy war, a reflection of the Mormon/non-Mormon divide that bisects Utah culture. Non-Mormons fancy the U. the secular school.

But to Mormons, that isn't really the case. Huge numbers of LDS faithful attend the U. The biggest cheer at the recent Utah-Air Force game went up for LDS Church President Thomas S. Monson, a U. alum who received an award at halftime. So there are both religious and intrareligious crosscurrents that animate this rivalry.

We suspect that anthropologists have this whole rivalry thing figured out. Interesting, isn't it, that humans who share most everything else in common can divide themselves into warring camps, at least metaphorically, over a football game. Or an election. Or whether they are Protestant Christians or Catholic Christians or Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims or whatever. For some reason, we have a need to organize ourselves into tribes of us and them. It must be rooted in evolution.

So to which tribe do we belong? Utah by 5, baby.