Conference realignment has broken up some of college football's longest rivalries, but it's restarted one of the best in Utah-BYU.
He was not then a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he grew up in Southern California watching therivalry 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.
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.
"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. 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.
"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.
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.""They started to take some of our kids away on the recruiting trail because they were part of a conference," Holmoe said."And that was hard on us.
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