The BYU Cougars and the Utah Utes have agreed to a home-and-home football series taking place during the 2011 and 2012 seasons, BYU Athletics Director Tom Holmoe announced Thursday.
The series will begin when Utah visits LaVell Edwards Stadium on September 17, 2011. The series finale will take place on September 15, 2012 at Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City.
BYU and Utah have met 91 times in the “Holy War” rivalry with Utah leading 53-34-4. The next meeting in the series will take place on November 27, 2010 at Utah.
With the addition of BYU, the 2011 Utah non-conference schedule is now complete. The Utes will open the 2011 season at home against Montana State on Thursday, September 1. They will then travel to BYU on September 17Â and to Pittsburgh on October 8.
BYU has games scheduled in 2011 at Oregon State (09/03), at Texas (09/10) and home games against Utah (09/17) and UCF (09/23).
Football Schedules:
Glad the Holy War is continuing. It will be odd seeing it played in December on opening day rather than senior day in November… but I imagine it’ll be that way the first few times. Let’s hope the Cougars can rebound from the bad year this season so it will be competitive.
Not sure why Utah would have agreed to this. They should have kept the game with Boise. The BYU game pay out is $100K less than Boise and does nothing to help thier SOS. A win over an indy BYU, who most likely will come into the game 0-2 is a lose/lose situation. At worst they should have picked up a one a done deal with a MWC team to provide the Utah fans a better OCC Home game schedule than Montana St. Hopefully the series ends in 2012.
Malc:
Why do you care about SOS? Don’t you understand that Utah will be in a power conference starting next year? Win the Pac10, you’ll get a BCS bid, and nobody will care about your SOS.
I too,am bummed with Utah scheduling BYU over Boise State…its another slam against the BCS conferences in ducking the Broncos. I mean,seriously,are all the big schools that scared of BSU? Be nice if Georgia or VT would man up and give BSU a return game….
Nobody is scared of Boise. Utah would much rather play their arch-rival every year, it just makes sense. They have been playing each other for over 100 years….
Not scared of Boise? Really? Thats why the Utes bailed on that game instead of canceling the game w/Montana State. Indeed.
Montana St. doesn’t require Utah to visit them.
You can’t honestly believe that Utah didn’t want to lighten up the schedule. Utah saw they had a semi decent reason to cancel BSU and took it. The reason why the PAC-12 will be playing 9 games is so the teams won’t be as tempted as the SEC to play mostly creampuffs as OOC. The PAC-10 currently bolsters the highest percentage of BCS opponent OOC games, and many of the rest are against upper WAC and MWC teams, not just the bottom fodder. (43% of OOC games were AQ schools, highest amongst the AQ conferences, while the SEC only scheduled 33%, and have a much easier time traveling to that competition)
go utes
Saying you can’t understand why Utah would agree to put BYU on their schedule is like wondering why Ohio State would want to play Michigan or why Notre Dame would want to play USC. It’s a rivalry. Why would any real Utah fan want to discard that? And have you looked at their schedule next year compared to this year’s? I don’t think SOS is a concern for them anymore. If Utah fans simply don’t want to put BYU on their schedule because they hate Mormons they should just say that so that we all can confirm that it’s for a stupid reason. As an atheist I’m not a fan of any religious institution, but I would never be hating on putting Notre Dame or TCU or Boston College or one of the numerous religious schools on my schedule. It’s football and it’s a rivalry, and a rather large one at that.