If the BYU vs. Notre Dame matchup on the game show “College Bowl” Friday night is any indication, the Cougars are going to have a thrilling game against the Fighting Irish when the football teams meet next week at Allegiant Stadium.
What happened during the BYU vs. Notre Dame ‘College Bowl’ game?
On Friday night, Brigham Young University faced off against Notre Dame University in the first quarterfinal round of “College Bowl,” a trivia game show hosted by Peyton and Cooper Manning.
Unlike the first round of the NBC competition, the quarterfinals are single elimination. The pressure was more palpable, but the Cougars — represented by BYU quiz bowl students Ben Potter, Frani King and Craig Walker — were ready for the challenge.
BYU won the coin toss and opted to start with a category titled “Literature studies: Southern Women” for the kickoff round. The first clue: “Although much of Zora Neale Hurston’s writing explores the rural South, she was a leader of what New York renewal of African-American culture?”
Notre Dame buzzed in with the correct answer: The Harlem Renaissance.
But BYU quickly got on the board when it stole the following question from Notre Dame: “Georgia Public Broadcasting says Flannery O’Connor defined Southern Gothic literature in such stories as ‘A Good Man is’ what?”
When Notre Dame couldn’t come up with the response, BYU got a chance to answer and correctly finished the O’Connor title: “Hard to Find.”
But that marked the only question the Cougars would get right during the kickoff round. Notre Dame went on to sweep all three questions in a chemistry-related category, and all three questions in a category about apex predators (Did you know that the Komodo Dragon consumes 80% of its body weight in a single feeding?).
Notre Dame finished the round with a 70-10 lead over BYU.
For the game’s second round — called the Handoff round — each question had three answers. Each player on the team was responsible for coming up with an answer (worth 20 points).
BYU started out the round with the category “traditions,” coming up with two of the three answers to the following question: “A common tradition says you need four things on your wedding day. The first is something old. Name the other three somethings.”
The Cougars came up with “something blue,” and “something new,” but couldn’t come up with “something borrowed.”
For the category “leading men,” the BYU students correctly named two of the three people who immediately preceded Boris Johnson as prime minister of the U.K.: David Cameron and Theresa May (they missed Gordon Brown).
But the Cougars’ big moment came when they correctly named the three colors on a standard roulette wheel: red, green and black.
Cooper Manning joked that the students were “a bunch of gamblers.”
“BYU, you know,” Potter quipped.
Notre Dame didn’t find the same success in this round, only coming up with one of the three countries on the island of Borneo: Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. The Fighting Irish also got stumped on a question asking for the names of the three daughters in the Shakespeare play “King Lear”: Cordelia, Goneril and Regan.
BYU took a slight lead over Notre Dame, finishing the round 150 to 130.
And then it was time for the two-minute drill.
For the final round, teams had to try to correctly answer as many questions as possible in two minutes. Each question was worth 25 points, with teams earning an additional 100 points for every five questions answered correctly.
BYU started out strong in this round, correctly answering the first seven questions. In total, the Cougars got 12 questions in two minutes, bringing their total score to 650. To win and move on to the next round, Notre Dame would need to get 13 questions.
Notre Dame started gaining momentum near the end, but ultimately timed out with 11 questions answered (interestingly, the clock ran out on a question about Zion National Park, located in southwest Utah).
And just like that, BYU was advancing to the semifinals. The Notre Dame students each went home with $10,000 in scholarship money.
The episode also featured a tight matchup between the Texas Longhorns and the Georgia Bulldogs, with the University of Georgia ultimately pulling through and advancing to the semifinals thanks to a 10 point lead.
When does ‘College Bowl’ air on NBC?
“College Bowl” airs on NBC Fridays at 7 p.m. MT. (You can stream episodes the following day on Peacock.)
The following teams still have to compete in the quarterfinals:
- University of Oklahoma.
- University of Washington.
- Penn State University.
- Spelman College.
- Syracuse University.
- UC Santa Barbara.
- Columbia University.
- Duke University.