PROVO, Utah — The buzz over this week's top-10 matchup between No. 2 Notre Dame and No. 8 BYU was palpable in the Utah Valley long before the season started, and the teams are right where they were expected to be heading into Saturday's clash in Provo.
Notre Dame is 6-0 against the nation's 63rd-toughest schedule, according to ESPN's power index, and BYU is 5-0 against the 86th toughest.
Now comes the first real test for both.
For the Fighting Irish, this is the next step on the "Leave No Doubt" tour they began in response to being left out of the College Football Playoff after winning 10 straight following losses by a combined four points to two ranked teams. No. 3 Miami is waiting in three weeks.
For the Cougars, even though this is one game on one night in one season, it feels bigger than that. It will be the first top-10 matchup ever played at LaVell Edwards Stadium and a potential watershed moment for a program that's usually good, sometimes very good, but has found greatness elusive.
Yes, BYU was the national champion in 1984 as the only unbeaten and untied team in the country. Critics dismissed it, and still do, as the product of an easy schedule in the old Western Athletic Conference.
Six years later, the Cougars upset top-ranked and reigning national champion Miami 28-21 in a game that propelled Ty Detmer to the Heisman Trophy. "We wanted respect. I think we have that now," Detmer said after the game. The Cougars lost to a middling Oregon three weeks later and the season ended with losses by a combined 82 points to Hawaii and Texas A&M.
In 1996, they won a school-record 14 games, but an early loss to Washington and that flimsy WAC schedule kept them out of the national championship conversation. They finished No. 5 in The Associated Press Top 25 and haven't appeared in the final top 10 since.
More recently, they opened 9-0 in 2024 and were in playoff contention until they lost at home to a 3-6 Kansas team and then at Arizona State. Last year, they were 8-0 and then lost a couple ugly games a month apart against Texas Tech, the first in Lubbock and the second in the Big 12 championship game.
Now, here they are again. A win over the Fighting Irish could help the Cougars get in the playoff as an at-large pick if they don't win the Big 12 and, just as important, go down as the most impactful victory since the Detmer-led team knocked off Miami 36 years ago.
A loss to the Irish wouldn't end BYU's playoff hopes, not with the rest of the Big 12 schedule to play, but it would surely be another point of pain for a program that, aside from 1984, has come up short time and again.