Fast fact

While it seems so natural to have the Utah-BYU game be the annual regular-season finale, on the third or fourth Saturday in November, it hasn't always been this way.

For three decades, from 1930 through 1963, the game was played during the first three weeks of October, usually the second weekend. Back in those days, the Utah-Utah State game was the big game at the end of the season, often on Thanksgiving Day.

The late November tradition for Utah and BYU began in 1969, and every Utah-BYU game except one has been played between Nov. 15 and 24 since then.

Who could forget

Utah came into the 1988 game with a 5-5 record, having given up 56 points to Air Force and 61 to Wyoming earlier in the season. The Utes were given little chance against a BYU team that was 8-2 and already headed to the Freedom Bowl.

But Eddie Johnson scored a pair of early touchdowns, and the rout was on when Sam Tausinga intercepted a poor pass by Sean Covey and rumbled into the end zone to make it 21-0 Utes early in the second quarter. By the end of the day, Johnson had rushed for 136 yards, Scott Mitchell had passed for 385 and the Utes celebrated their first win over the Cougars in a decade, 57-28.

Quotable

"The thing that's really discouraging is that we're right back to where we were three years ago. I was hoping we were closing the gap." — Utah coach Chuck Stobart in 1983, after his team lost 55-7 to BYU, almost the identical score to the 56-6 whipping three years earlier.

Numbers of note

20 and 0 — Those are the most common final scores for each team in the long history of the rivalry. Utah has finished with 20 points on seven occasions, most recently in 1999, while BYU has finished with zero points 19 times, most recently in 2003.