WHEN TOM HOLMOE arrived in Provo to play football in 1978, his understanding of the BYU–Utah rivalry was next to nothing.

He was not then a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he grew up in Southern California watching the USC–UCLA rivalry with his brother playing for the Bruins. So when the Cougars’ bus rolled up to Rice Stadium in Salt Lake City his freshman year, Holmoe was curious how the atmosphere would measure up. He was redshirting, and BYU had already clinched the WAC title, but the intensity he felt on the sideline was unlike anything he had ever experienced.

“It was a cold day, but it was hot on the field,” said Holmoe, BYU’s athletic director since 2005.

BYU’s six-game winning streak in the rivalry ended that day, and while the Cougars would still be playing in the first-ever Holiday Bowl — back when reaching a bowl game was a genuine achievement — it was a bitter pill for Holmoe to swallow. He remembered a cartoon in a local newspaper downplaying the bowl bid in light of the rivalry loss.

“It was not a great feeling, and that was my first experience,” Holmoe said.

Holmoe went on to win all four games he participated in — three with Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham as a fellow standout on defense — and over the past four-plus decades has become convinced the “Holy War” is as intense as any game in college football.

“I love college football,” he said. “And I think one of the greatest things about college football is the rivalries. I don’t know where BYU-Utah ranks, I just know it’s one of the great rivalries of all time.”

The first meeting took place in 1896, and for most of its history, it was played as a conference game. After starting their early days in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, the schools moved as a pair to the Skyline Conference (1938), to the WAC (1962) and, finally, to the Mountain West (1999) before the Pac-12 came calling and pried Utah away before the 2011 season, ushering in BYU’s independent era and move to the Big 12 last year.

Those who have taken part in this rivalry over the past 13 years say the lack of conference stakes had no bearing on game day. In fact, Utah’s departure and elevation to Power 5 status introduced a new point of contention between the schools. Still, things were different. They started playing in September instead of November and — for the first time since World War II — took years off.

“I think Utah tried to diminish it a little bit, because now they were in the big leagues and BYU wasn’t, and I think BYU fans felt like they were being dissed a little bit,” said former BYU AD Val Hale, a lifelong BYU fan who is writing a book about the 24 years he spent working in the athletic department. “Utah was trying to say, ‘Oh, this game isn’t that important to us anymore.’ So, I think there was a little bit of offense taken on the part of BYU fans. I think some BYU fans would say that the Utah fans were a little bit snobbish, and were trying to look down their noses at BYU because we weren’t in the Pac-12 like they were.”

Last summer, the future of the rivalry was in jeopardy. Conference realignment has a nasty habit of breaking up rivalries, and while it had already been chipping away at the tradition in Utah, BYU’s move to the Big 12 gave the Cougars less scheduling flexibility and less incentive to schedule a difficult nonconference game.

In a strange twist of fate, however, the Pac-12 collapsing created a domino effect that led to Utah joining the Big 12, reuniting the Utes and Cougars as conference rivals once again. On Saturday (10:15 p.m. ET on ESPN), Utah hosts No. 9 BYU in what could be the most consequential rivalry game for BYU in a generation, as a conference title will result in a berth in the College Football Playoff.

ONE OF THE first things neutral fans might notice from the game is that both teams will wear their home uniforms: Utah in red; BYU in blue.

It stems from Holmoe’s roots in Southern California. For several decades, as UCLA and USC shared the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, they both donned home uniforms. It’s a tradition that went away in 1982 when UCLA started playing home games at the Rose Bowl, but USC coach Pete Carroll brought it back in 2008, despite it being a violation of NCAA rules. The rule changed in 2009, permitting both teams to wear home uniforms, and soon after Holmoe went to his counterpart at Utah, Chris Hill.

“I said, ‘One of the great things about the USC-UCLA rivalry is they play in their home colors for every game. Let’s do it,'” Holmoe said. “And he goes, ‘What do you mean?’ I say, ‘Well, you wear red, we’ll wear blue no matter what the sport is or where the game’s played.’ And so we started this tradition (in 2011), and it’s kind of fun because the color and pageantry of college football comes out.”

For Utah natives like BYU captain Tyler Batty, the game’s importance is ingrained into their consciousness from a young age.

“My earliest memory was probably in elementary school,” Batty said at Big 12 media days this summer. “Just me and a bunch of friends getting together at someone’s house and watching the game. It’s not like you’re really watching that much of the game when you’re 10, 11 years old, but you’re catching on to how competitive it is. It’s pretty legendary.”

Some of the most legendary moments are only tangential to the results.

In 1999, there was an infamous incident in which a BYU fan came over the railing from the stands and attempted to tackle a male Utah cheerleader, who had been running with a flag.

“The cheerleader jumped on top of him and started pummeling him,” Hale said. “Everybody in the stadium — 65,000 people — is watching this. All I could see was someone pummeling someone on the ground. I thought it was an usher.

“So, I went running down the sideline — here’s the AD running down the sideline — and by the time I got down there it had been broken up. I went to talk to the Utah cheerleading coach and he was telling me what happened, and to this day there are still stories out there that I got in a fight with the cheerleader. You know how stories get warped and twisted.”

Another bizarre moment that doesn’t get twisted came in 2012, the year Utah fans rushed the field three times during and after the Utes’ 24-21 upset of then-No. 25 BYU. The first came after fans thought time had expired following an incomplete pass, when there was still 1 second left on the clock. The next came during a 51-yard missed field-goal attempt, which triggered a 15-yard penalty and gave BYU a second, closer field goal try. When that one failed, too, the fans rushed the field for a third time.

UP UNTIL LAVELL Edwards was named the BYU head coach prior to the 1972 season, the rivalry was lopsided in favor of Utah. Then, with Edwards at the helm for the next 29 years, BYU controlled the series.

In 2001, the first year after Edwards retired, BYU took a 10-0 record into the game in Provo and trailed 21-10 with 3:30 to play before Luke Staley, the eventual Doak Walker Award winner, scored two touchdowns in the final minutes as the Cougars sought to become the first nonpower-conference program to reach a BCS bowl. (They would lose three weeks later at Hawai’i and miss the BCS.)

When quarterback Alex Smith signed with Utah a couple of months later, the pendulum swung back in the Utes’ favor. Smith’s introduction into the rivalry was similar to Holmoe’s: He came from Southern California, didn’t know the history and watched the first game, in 2002, from the sideline.

“I think both teams were not very good at that point, but I remember thinking how crazy the game was,” said Smith, who is now an NFL analyst for ESPN. “Sold out and just how intense the game was for both sides.”

When Urban Meyer was named coach at Utah the following year, he turned up the heat on the rivalry, refusing to call BYU by name, referring to them only as the “team down south.”

Come rivalry time, the Utes were 8-2 and needed to beat BYU to win the Mountain West title. The forecast called for a blizzard.

“Just calling it snow wouldn’t do it justice,” Smith said. “It was a complete whiteout blizzard, and our senior running back had gotten hurt, so we were down to a true freshman, I think. I’ll never forget on the sideline, Urban was like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna call your number a bunch. Just hang on to the football.’ I think I had like 24 carries for 40 yards or so, but we won the game 3-0 and it was awesome. Just an ugly, ugly game, but it didn’t matter. What a good drive back to Salt Lake from Provo.”

The shutout compounded the disappointment for BYU, which entered the game having scored in an NCAA-record 361 straight games dating back to 1975 — a streak that has since been passed by Michigan, Florida and TCU.

“It was something we bragged about all the time at the end of every game,” Hale said.

The next year, BYU’s visit to Utah set the stage for one of the best days in Utes history.

“[ESPN’s] ‘College GameDay’ came to Utah for the first time ever. We had a chance to clinch our undefeated season, break the BCS, win our conference and beat BYU all at the same time,” Smith said. “Incredibly special. Sold out crowd again, the whole country is watching, to get the win and the students rush the field and there are sombreros everywhere. Pretty epic win and, again, to do it against BYU made it even sweeter.”

BYU got some measure of revenge two years later with “Beck to Harline,” an iconic finish that saw the Cougars win with an 11-yard touchdown pass from John Beck to Jonny Harline on the final play of the game that became known as the “Answered Prayer.”

Then the Cougars followed that memorable win with another the next year, best remembered for a fourth-and-18 conversion on a pass from Max Hall to Austin Collie, which prompted Collie to deliver a famous line: “Magic happens.”

After Utah moved to the Pac-12 in 2011, BYU had a hard time conjuring that magic again.

“They started to take some of our kids away on the recruiting trail because they were part of a [Power 5] conference,” Holmoe said. “And that was hard on us.”

Utah won the first eight games in the series after leaving the Mountain West, including a 2015 appearance in the Las Vegas Bowl, when the nonconference game was on a two-year hiatus.

BYU ended the losing skid with a 26-17 win in 2021 — when Utah would go on to win the Pac-12 and play in the Rose Bowl — but that was the only meeting in the past four seasons.

Had the Pac-12 remained intact, infrequent matchups likely would have remained the norm. Utah’s move to the Big 12 this summer changed that.

“The state gets wildly excited about that game, and it has been hit and miss the last several years,” Whittingham said. “But now that we’re both in the same conference, and it’s going to be an annual thing. It will be the single biggest sporting event in the state of Utah every year.

WHEN BIG 12 teams gathered in Las Vegas in July, it was Utah that received all the preseason adoration. Utah was selected as the favorite to win the conference, largely in part due to the expected return of quarterback Cam Rising, who led the Utes to Pac-12 titles in 2021 and 2022.

BYU’s Darius Lassiter was complimentary of the Utes at the time, but issued a warning ahead of their arrival to the Big 12.

“I think it’s going to be more of a surprise to them than what they might think,” he said. “… It’s not an easy league at all. There are a lot of good teams here and then we just added three other teams including themselves, so it is not going to be just a walk in the park for them.”

Perhaps he undersold it.

After starting the season 4-0, Utah has dropped its past four and lost Rising to another season-ending injury. The Utes are 1-4 in the Big 12, and their dismal offensive performances led to the departure of offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig. At this point, if the Utes reach bowl eligibility it would be a surprise.

“Certainly the seasons have gone in completely different directions than what was anticipated at the onset,” Whittingham said. “I guess that shows that those preseason rankings and thoughts really don’t mean a whole lot.”

BYU is the inverse example.

The Cougars debuted at No. 9 in the initial College Football Playoff rankings Tuesday, and while there are compelling arguments for why they should be higher, it’s an enviable position for almost the entire country.

Playing spoiler isn’t what the Utes originally had in mind, but it is a powerful motivator.

“To own the state of Utah, to sour out those guys’ season, it would be big for us and the team,” said Utes running back Jaylon Glover, who also levied an expletive toward BYU in an interview with local reporters this week, for which he issued a follow-up apology on social media.

Just as they were for Holmoe all those years ago, the rivalry burns hot. And while pride has been enough to fuel this rivalry, meaningful stakes are sure to turn up the heat.

California high school quarterback prospect Cole Leinart, the son of former USC star and Heisman Trophy winner Matt Leinart, committed to SMU on Wednesday.

Leinart, a 6-foot-3 right-hander, is a junior at California’s Redondo Union High School. Not currently rated by ESPN, he held several Power 4 offers and picked the Mustangs over Colorado, Arizona and Utah to become the second member of coach Rhett Lashlee’s 2026 class.

“The culture they’re building at SMU — I just want to be a part of it,” Leinart told ESPN. “I love the coaching staff. They’re literally like family now. I just want to be part of what they have there.”

Way to go bud. Proud of you. This is just the beginning! #ponyup https://t.co/AsU9pXiltl

— Matt Leinart (@MattLeinartQB) November 6, 2024

Leinart’s commitment landed Wednesday, nearly 19 years since his father closed a legendary playing career at USC.

Matt Leinart was a three-time All-American with the Trojans from 2001 to 2005, carrying a record of 37-2 across three seasons as a starter during which USC won back-to-back national titles (2003 and 2004). Leinart set 16 program records over the course of his college career and became the Trojans’ sixth Heisman Trophy winner in 2004. He went on to spend six seasons in the NFL with the Arizona Cardinals, Houston Texans and Oakland Raiders.

The younger Leinart now joins cornerback Victor Lincoln (Lancaster, Texas) as the second prospect committed to SMU in 2026. In the 2025 cycle, the Mustangs hold a quarterback pledge from four-star dual-threat passer Ty Hawkins, who flipped from TCU in July. Hawkins is one of three ESPN 300 prospects committed to SMU’s 2025 class, which sits at No. 28 in the latest team rankings for the cycle.

Leinart began his high school career at California power Mater Dei High School before transferring to Newport Harbor last fall. Leinart then transferred to Redondo Union prior to his junior season this fall, and he made his debut on Sept. 27 after being sidelined for four games due to California Interscholastic Federation transfer rules. Leinart and Redondo Union will open the 2024 postseason this week against California’s Aquinas High School.

SMU was the first program to seriously pursue Leinart when the Mustangs offered him a scholarship under former coach Sonny Dykes prior to Leinart’s freshman year of high school. Dykes moved on to TCU shortly thereafter, but Leinart remained in touch with the Mustangs and soon developed a close relationship with Lashlee, SMU’s third-year coach.

Leinart’s commitment to the Mustangs comes days after he visited SMU and attended the team’s 48-25 win over Pitt on Saturday.

“They’ve been No. 1 for a long time, and then I got out to a game this past weekend,” Leinart said. “It was awesome to see. The offense is open. The defense is lights out. And it’s just a fun team. The whole vibe is just awesome. I’m happy to be a part of it.”

For Leinart, who initially followed in his father’s footsteps at Mater Dei, college football represents an opportunity to continue a family legacy in the sport.

“Everyone sees the last name, but they don’t really see the work that my parents put in for me to get to this place,” Leinart said. “This isn’t just me. This is everything. I get to carry the tradition and play football, and I think they’re happy for me.”

SMU (8-1) was selected at No. 13 in the first rankings released by the College Football Playoff selection committee Tuesday. The Mustangs are off in Week 11 ahead of a visit from Boston College on Nov. 16.

The woman involved in an altercation that led to the arrest and suspension of Georgia wide receiver Colbie Young last month has retracted her statement to police and requested that all criminal charges against him be dropped, according to an affidavit provided to ESPN on Wednesday by Young’s attorney.

Young was arrested on Oct. 8 on misdemeanor charges of battery and assault of an unborn child, according to Athens-Clarke County Jail records.

According to an Athens-Clarke County Police incident report obtained by ESPN, a 20-year-old woman, who described herself as Young’s ex-girlfriend, told police that she went to his apartment to discuss their relationship.

When the conversation became heated after she discovered he was on the phone with another woman, the complainant said Young “grabbed her left arm near her biceps and triceps and physically pulled her out of his room.” The woman said Young was “using derogatory terms and being demeaning of her.” She said Young went back to his room and locked the door.

The woman told police she started to collect her belongings when a friend called her phone. When she answered, the woman told police, “Mr. Young came out and grabbed her from behind. She said that he picked her up and began to squeeze her torso and abdomen very hard. She said she felt like [Young] was trying to harm her.”

The police officer noted in the report that he observed a bruise and discoloration on the bottom of the woman’s chest where it meets the abdomen, and redness on her right side. The police officer transported the woman to an Athens hospital for treatment.

In an affidavit released Wednesday by Young’s attorney, Kim Stephens, the woman said the police report was “slanted and does not accurately portray what occurred on Oct. 8.”

“I did go to Colbie’s apartment late at night to talk to him about our relationship and my pregnancy,” the woman said in the affidavit. “Colbie asked me to leave more than once while I was there. I did not leave until I became upset with him and did not think our conversation was productive.

“Colbie did not place his hands on me in any way during the conversation and argument that was inappropriate or unwanted. He did not hit me. He did not push me. He did not cause any bruising or marks on me. He did not injure me in any way.”

According to the affidavit, the woman asked the Athens-Clarke County Solicitor General’s Office on Oct. 14 to dismiss the charges against Young. The woman said she made several subsequent requests to prosecutors since then.

“As evident by the affidavit, Colbie Young did not commit any crime in this matter and all charges against him should be dismissed immediately,” Stephens said in a statement to ESPN on Wednesday. “Likewise, because the affidavit fully exonerates Mr. Young, the University of Georgia should allow Mr. Young to return to all team activities including participation in games.”

The solicitor’s office did not immediately respond to ESPN’s request for comment late Wednesday.

Stephens said he provided the woman’s statement to the university and prosecutors.

When reached by ESPN for comment Wednesday, Georgia athletic department spokesman Steven Drummond reiterated that the case is a legal matter and the school would have no further comment.

Young was suspended from the team by Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart the day after the incident.

“He’s been suspended indefinitely until this legal matter is resolved,” Smart said at the time. “We can’t really comment any further on the specifics of it, but I had a good meeting with him this morning. We’re committed to continuing to educate our players and do the best job we can of making sure they understand the serious nature of these incidents.

“It’s very unfortunate, but we want to be responsible in decision-making on and off the field. This is obviously a really tough situation.”

Young, who played two seasons at Miami before transferring to Georgia, had 11 catches for 149 yards with two touchdowns in the first five games. He has sat out the team’s past three games.