Is the Utah-BYU football rivalry a good thing, a bad thing, a worthwhile thing or a relative no-thing? For that matter, is any sports rivalry useful and/or healthy?
Recently in social media circles there’s been a lot of talk — it’s what folks do in the offseason and, come to think of it, during the on season, too — about college football rivalries, which are the best, which are the most fierce, which are the most heated, which are the most pronounced.
And near the top end of much of that conversation, the Cougars and Utes have been listed, or at least mentioned, alongside Ohio State-Michigan, Alabama-Auburn, Army-Navy, Oklahoma-Texas, Georgia-Florida, USC-Notre Dame, and all the rest.
On Twitter, somebody put down the BYU-Utah thing, saying it wasn’t that notable. And somebody else pointed out that it was notable enough to have fueled a wider Twitter firestorm of Big 12-Pac-12 back-and-forth.
The Big 12 is better. Why? Because BYU and its fans are in it.
The Pac-12 is better. Why? Because Utah and its fans are in it.
Who’s right? Doesn’t matter. Association is all it takes to tip the point of view.
I’ve studied — if that’s the right word — the Utah-BYU rivalry (notice how I keep flipping the names in the title) for nearly 50 years now. And I’ve come to a few conclusions.
Before we get to them, what do you make of the rivalry? Do you enjoy it? Do you look forward to it? Do you think the schools should keep playing each other despite being in different leagues (for the time being, anyway)? Even that little comment will ignite emotion on the part of fans. Does the rivalry make sports in this state more compelling, more interesting, more meaningful or just more irrational and stupid?
There was a commentary in The New York Times from a fistful of years ago written by an organizational expert who said that sports rivalries fill some sort of tribal need. He claimed that they offer “real psychological benefits.”
What he meant by that is, apparently, humans need to feel connected to other humans in some kind of elevated way. The word he used was “privileged.”
“We are wired to be part of a group and to treat our group members (our ingroup) as privileged over everyone else,” he wrote. “We feel pride, warmth and security by belonging to a group. A consequence of being part of a fan base is that partisans of a rival team form an outgroup. We naturally treat outgroup members with some suspicion and contempt.”
Uh-huh.
He mentioned further that rivalries typically are safe, but not always. They raise energy and emotional levels in fans that take time to develop, teams facing off against each other year after year after year, causing what psychologists call “arousal.” An odd use of that word, but the full spectrum of arousal runs from slight to maniacal.
Anyone who’s been to a Utah-BYU football game knows this, having witnessed the full spectrum.
It’s rather remarkable, if you really consider it, that some fans who have no real effect or impact on whether the Utes or Cougars are better than the others in any given year take so much gratification, borrow so much self-esteem from what the young dudes down on the field do, that that gives them cause to brag. It’s assumed, taken for granted, that that is the case, but it requires an advanced degree in psychology to truly dive deep enough into the human condition to sort through the rudiments of it all.
And yet, the rudiments are there, the self-esteem is boosted, the boasting is done.
All good.
What isn’t good is when it goes too far, when the self-worth transforms into foolishness, when fans get violent or start poisoning trees on the other team’s campus or when cars are vandalized or cell phones are swiped or even when words are weaponized into profane verbal bombs.
I’ve consistently supported the BYU-Utah rivalry, the continuation of it. Some do not agree. Kyle Whittingham isn’t a big proponent. Athletic directors Mark Harlan and Tom Holmoe speak as though they certainly see the value in maintaining what has been a sports standard in the state for the past century to go on being a standard, with perhaps an occasional exception. There are hints that other people in positions of power are not so committed to it.
And even as some fans, often younger ones, have thrown shade on the rivalry, using their purported disinterest in it, in and of itself, as an aggressive form of trash talk — “We don’t need to play those bozos” — the interest in the game, the attendance at it, continues to counter that line of thinking. A large majority of fans, not all, want the football rivalry to be preserved.
The reason returns to a mix of proximity and the psychological. There is red and there is blue all over Utah and beyond. Pick any street in just about any city — perhaps with the exception of some communities in Utah County — and there are Utes and Cougars living there, not infrequently under the same roof. There are 50.1 driving miles between the campuses at BYU and Utah. That will always be the case. Both schools have ambitions to compete at a high level of college football. That will be the case as long as … well, as long as it is.
The game is worth playing, then.
Some say the fact that the schools compete in different conferences undercuts the rivalry. I get that. But it could be — especially in seasons when both Utah and BYU are at the upper reaches of their leagues, looking for a playoff spot — that the separation might make the clash even more riveting, more meaningful for the winners, more devastating for the side on the short end of the score.
Here’s what I’ve observed and concluded from seeing the rivalry up close for so long now:
• The war nickname sucks.
Outsiders seem to love that label, and it does add pepper to the game, but it’s a misnomer. It’s not even accurate in football terms. There are followers of the LDS faith on both sidelines, in both fan bases, and there are followers of other faiths or no faith at all on both sidelines, in both fan bases.
BYU does, at times, lay the religious stuff on too thick, promoting from within the whole magic-happens-when-you’re-living-right-on-and-off-the-field nonsense. If that were the case, then the Cougars must have been sinning up a storm during that long Utah win streak. Point is, religion plays no role in football, not when it comes to asking for God’s favor over the other guys. And even if God did grant that, the other guys are praying just as hard.
There’s no denying two facts in this regard, though: 1) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the owners and operators of BYU, does wield a ridiculous amount of power inside state politics, and 2) Some Utah fans rightfully resent that power and use the rivalry game as a chance to emotionally lash back at that control.
• As mentioned, it’s not just the media that wants the game to continue because it stirs up so much interest, it’s the fans who want it to continue and it’s their interest that’s the best reason to keep playing it. The stadiums are always jammed for that game, the tickets tough to get, the week leading up to that Saturday full of chatter here and there.
• There are some numbskulls who take their fandom against their rivals too far, dancing at times on the edge of lunacy. But most Utah and BYU fans see the game for what it is — and enjoy giving their mom or dad or sister or brother or cousin or neighbor or buddy on the job or at church or on the golf course the business when their team wins.
Most of them know full well that whichever side wins, whichever loses, in reality it does not make them more or less handsome or pretty, more or less intelligent or dumb, more or less valuable to society.
Deep psychological analysis or not, it simply means the team they root for, the one they spend money on, the one whose gear they buy, the one that reps the school they attended, either won or lost a freaking football game.
And that’s good — or bad — enough.
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