Ho, hum, both BYU and Utah appear in this week’s national college football rankings. Did anyone even notice?
It hardly raises an eyebrow these days. It’s become routine — nothing to see here, folks, move on — but for those who have watched these football programs since before email and ED ads, it still takes a little getting used to.
BYU is ranked 11th this week, Utah 17th. BYU is sandwiched between Alabama and USC — yeah, those guys. Utah ranks two places ahead of Michigan and seven places ahead of Oklahoma.
What in the name of Bear Bryant is going on?
For decades, it was a rarity when one of those schools showed up in the rankings, but now both of them? Regularly?
It wasn’t that long ago that nobody took BYU and Utah seriously — outside of state lines, that is. They were on the outside looking in. They were shut out of the club. There were the blue-blooded schools — college football royalty — and then everybody else. The Utes and Cougars were mouth-breathing cousins from the Western Athletic Conference.
Only a few years ago, BYU couldn’t even find a respected conference that would have them (the Cougars were all but down on their hands and knees begging for membership); the Utes saw the Pac-12 implode underneath them, with several schools running off to the exclusive conferences. None would have the Utes until the Big 12 threw them a lifeline, but only after its league also imploded.
Now here they are, having shouldered their way among football royalty. They just wouldn’t go away and now the newcomers are part of the in-crowd. It’s like the Beverly Hillbillies are hanging out with the Carnegies and Windsors. They are one of college football’s big shots. Ohio State, Texas, Oregon, Florida … BYU, Utah.
For decades, it was an event when one of those schools cracked the Top 25, so what were the odds that these two teams would appear in the national rankings simultaneously?
The Utes played football for more than a half-century before they made their first appearance in what was then the Top 20. During Week 6 of the 1947 season, they were ranked 18th; a week later, they were gone, never to appear again for nearly another half-century.
It took the Cougars 52 years to make their first appearance in the Top 20. In 1974, they ranked 20th in Week 13 and 17th in Week 14 and then they disappeared.
All that has changed dramatically. Utah has appeared in the weekly Top 25 rankings 196 times, all but one of them since 1994. BYU has appeared in the weekly Top 25 rankings 308 times, all of them since 1974, 64 of them in just the last five seasons.
It wasn’t until 2004 that Utah and BYU appeared in the rankings together. In the 22 years since then, it has occurred 65 times, all but nine of them since 2008.
BYU and Utah, which began playing football in 1882 (with a few stops and starts), didn’t crack the FINAL Top 25 rankings until 1977, Utah in 1994. They have appeared in the Final Top 25 together five times — 1994, 2008, 2009, 2021, 2025.
Kalani Sitake, the BYU head coach, is a commodity now — Penn State pursued him last winter — and it has all but been forgotten that he was on the hot seat for a time. He made his first mistake right out of the gate, building his first coaching staff almost entirely with former BYU players.
It was a nice story, a reunion of BYU buddies, but it was doomed to fail and it did. He had to dismiss most of them and start over, and there were a lot of questions about Sitake’s job security. Then there was BYU’s very public search for a conference home — a dozen years of independent status that brought a lot of challenges with it and contributed even more to its status as an outsider on the national football scene.
Utah, which had been a .500 team for 50 years, took a big step up under Ron McBride and then another step up under Urban Meyer’s short stay and then Kyle Whittingham kept them there for two decades with only a few setbacks. The Utes had two 5-7 seasons shortly after joining the Pac-12 and then another 5-7 season after joining the Big 12.
Utah and BYU are now a force on the national scene. We’ve become accustomed to this by now.
