Opinion: Pat McAfee Loved Provo and 'Hated' Utah. Salt Lake Earned Every Word.

This is an opinion column. We're from Provo, and we're picking a side. Every quote is real, and the sources are listed at the bottom.

Same show, two college towns, one week apart.

On Oct. 17, Pat McAfee stood in front of a sea of blue in Provo and told it, "We've entered an ethereal realm. A heavenly place." He showed up in a white shirt and tie. He picked BYU. A freshman in a Spider-Man suit made a $3 million field goal, and that night BYU beat No. 2 Notre Dame.

On Oct. 24 he did the same show in Salt Lake City. The night before he got there, the University of Utah's own Instagram account put out a video of students calling him "corny" and "creepy." On Monday, Oct. 26, McAfee went on his show and said of the University of Utah: "I hate this place. I hate this place."

That's the line everybody ran with. The better story is why it happened in Salt Lake and not in Provo, and why almost nobody who grew up in this state was surprised.

Here's McAfee saying it himself on Monday's show, cued to the Utah segment:

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Getting booed is the job. Getting booed by the school isn't.

If you're reading this from outside Utah, some context. Working on College GameDay means getting yelled at for a living. Kirk Herbstreit, an Ohio State alum, moved his family out of Ohio in 2011 after years of grief from a slice of Buckeye fans over his picks. "They probably represent only 5 to 10 percent of the fan base, but they are relentless," he said back then.

So McAfee knows fans. Fans boo. Fans make rude signs. He loves that part, and he said as much on the Saturday in Salt Lake. What he told his audience he had never seen before was the host school doing it.

"If these kids would have done this on their own blogs, all good," he said Monday. "The university puts that out, like, as I'm about to go out and do an infomercial for the place." Then: "That is something I just had never experienced really in my entire life."

Hang on to that word, university. It comes up again.

Provo, Oct. 17: how you host somebody

McAfee came to Provo already a little in love with the place. Two days before the show, he said of BYU's players, "Super mature, already has a family, wildly athletic and handsome. That is seemingly a trait that (BYU players) have," the Deseret News reported. He added, "There's a lot of different Mormons that I've encountered who I have a lot of respect for."

Provo took that and ran with it. He showed up in a white shirt, tie and blue blazer and joked that he was wearing "Brother Herbstreit's tie that Brother Howard tied for me." He billed Notre Dame at BYU as "the Catholics coming to take on the Mormons, a tale as potentially old as time." He looked out at the crowd and said, "A biblical outcome could potentially happen in this glorious city that is all about ball."

People outside Utah tend to miss something about Provo. It's a town where four out of five people in the county are on the rolls of one church, the stadium doesn't sell beer, and the student section will still out-yell anybody in the country. It's also a town that can laugh at itself. When McAfee riffed on a church leader's talk about gambling ("So there's not gambling out here, there's just passion and it's all toward the Cougars"), the crowd started chanting "Baptize Pat!" at a guy from the Pittsburgh suburbs. He took it as the compliment it was. A student held up a sign charging him with "16 honor code violations." "I've been living by the book … of Mormon," McAfee answered. "I'm trying my best."

Then Steve Young sat in as guest picker and went 10-for-10. Then BYU freshman Carter Smith, in a full Spider-Man suit, missed his first kick and drilled his second, a 33-yarder worth $3 million: $1 million from McAfee and $1 million each from Utah Jazz and Mammoth owner Ryan Smith and his business partner Ryan Sweeney, KSL reported. That night, BYU beat Notre Dame 28-24.

And yes, somewhere in all that, a student tossed a Book of Mormon onto the set. McAfee picked it up, read a passage out loud on national TV and handed it back to Rece Davis with, "Nephi's really spittin' in there." He said on his show later that none of it was planned: "I pick it up, the place goes crazy." It's a great clip whether you've ever set foot in a church or not, mostly because it's a guy having the time of his life:

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Not everybody got the joke. 247Sports' Brad Crawford posted, "Now we've got Pat McAfee mocking the Book of Mormon on College GameDay." Plenty of people pushed back, and they were right. He read it straight, the crowd ate it up, and he picked BYU anyway. If that's mocking, Provo will take more.

Two days later, with Young back on his show, McAfee said, "That was a special day there in Provo." Young said, "We're in the upper echelons. We're not just punching above our weight anymore."

Salt Lake City, Oct. 24: how you don't

Give Utah's students their due. They showed up, and they showed up early. Many camped out for days. "We haven't slept in at least three days preparing for this," one junior told KSL. The student section was loud, and McAfee said so more than once.

The trouble started with the adults. The night before the show, the university's official Instagram account and Utah Student Experience posted a video inviting students to do their best McAfee. One called him "corny." Another called him "creepy." It went up on Instagram and TikTok, and by Monday it was gone.

McAfee clearly saw it. On Saturday he told the crowd, "The university's Instagram account posted something talking a little trash about me last night, which I certainly love." Then the kicking contest went sideways. The Utah contestant reminded him that BYU's kicker had played for $3 million, said $1 million wasn't enough, and missed. Think about that for a second: on Utah's big morning, the kid with the microphone was talking about BYU.

McAfee picked Houston. "It's hard to pick against this mighty Utah student section, but I'm gonna do it ten times out of ten." His signoff: "Thank you, guys. I'll never see you again, hopefully."

Utah did win the game, 21-13. Enjoy it, Utes. Your guest isn't coming back.

Monday: "I hate this place"

On Monday's show he let all of it out. KSL, KUTV and Yahoo Sports carried the quotes:

• "Did not enjoy University of Utah."
• "One kid goes, 'Ah, he's corny.' Another kid calls me creepy."
• "Do we think we should be amplifying reasons for why people hate my guts as a university?"
• "I've never been more uncomfortable, honestly, in my life, walking in front of a group of people after watching their university put out a post basically dogging me just moments before."
• "It's like, all right, I hate this place. I hate this place."
• "I'll hopefully never go to that place."
• "I think I have COVID or something whenever GameDay goes back if I'm still a part of GameDay."

He was pretty fair about it, which is what makes it sting. "They got a good football team, though," he said. "They do have an incredible student section, from my understanding." And: "But it was a phenomenal GameDay. Thank you to everybody that showed up." He didn't have a beef with the students. In his words: "Just didn't like the university taking a shot at me."

He also said why the video hit him so hard: "especially with what happened 40 miles south of Salt Lake City a little over a year ago." Forty miles south of Salt Lake is Orem, where Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University in September 2025. McAfee didn't say Kirk's name, but most people listening knew what he meant. A university nudging a crowd to see its guest as "creepy," in this state, a year after that, seemed reckless to him. Hard to disagree. Our report on what happened at UVU and what it left behind covers that day.

The University of Utah has done this before

The national write-ups skipped this part. The McAfee video wasn't a one-off. The University of Utah, the institution and the people around it, has a long habit of punching at whoever's standing next to BYU.

• March 2014. After Oregon knocked BYU out of the NCAA basketball tournament, the U's official Twitter account posted, "Last time #byu beat #UofU, it's been years right? #littlebrother," The Daily Utah Chronicle reported. Ute fans asked for it to come down. AP reporter John Coon said the account "shouldn't be tweeting out inflammatory stuff about BYU." It was deleted, and the account posted, "We apologize to #byu for congratulating Oregon on their win tonight." Official account, a cheap shot, deleted, nobody explains. Sound familiar?
• September 2013. The week of the BYU game, a video surfaced of Utah football players doing what looked like a mock baptism. Coach Kyle Whittingham said in a statement that he saw "no malice or harmful intent toward any particular religious group" and that it had been addressed.
• November 2024. BYU won 22-21 at Rice-Eccles on a field goal with three seconds left. Utah athletic director Mark Harlan went to the microphones: "This game absolutely was stolen from us." "We won this game, someone else stole it from us." The Big 12 fined him $40,000. That same night, BYU cheer coach Jocelyn Allan said a water bottle thrown from the south end zone seats hit her in the head and she lost consciousness, CBS Sports reported.
• The week of that game, Utah running back Jaylon Glover summed up his feelings about the Cougars in two words. The first was "F***."
• Go back to 2009, when BYU quarterback Max Hall said after an overtime win, "I don't like Utah. In fact, I hate them. I hate everything about them," and called the university, its fans and its organization "classless." That was over the line. The Mountain West reprimanded him, and he apologized. But the reason he gave never went away: at Rice-Eccles the year before, he said, "my family was spit on, had beer dumped on them and were physically assaulted on several occasions."

None of that makes every Ute fan a jerk. Most aren't. But this is a school whose official accounts have now picked fights with BYU and with ESPN's biggest personality, deleted them both, and moved on. At some point it stops being an accident and starts being a house style.

Church and state: the part nobody says on TV

Every Utahn knows this, and almost nobody on national TV will say it out loud.

Start with the irony. The University of Utah was founded in 1850 as the University of Deseret, under the direction of Brigham Young, according to the state's own history site. The school that Salt Lake now treats as the not-BYU was started by the same pioneer prophet BYU is named after.

Fast forward. BYU is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Utah is the state's flagship public university, sitting in the capital. And the two counties have drifted apart. In 2020, Latter-day Saints made up 46.89% of Salt Lake County, The Salt Lake Tribune reported, down below half. Utah County was 80.43%. In an earlier analysis, the Tribune called the cultural divide between Salt Lake County and "its southern neighbor, conservative Utah County" particularly stark.

Dick Harmon, who has covered this rivalry for decades at the Deseret News, is careful about it. It isn't simply believers against nonbelievers, he wrote, and church members play for both schools. But fan divisions sometimes fall along religious lines, and in his words, "some of the bad does have religious overtones."

Our read, and it's an opinion: For a lot of Utahns who aren't members of the church, or who left it, the Utes aren't just a team. They're the team that isn't the church's. Wearing red is a way of saying you're from the other Utah. There's nothing wrong with that; it's part of what makes this the best rivalry in the West. But it's also why a BYU win in Salt Lake feels personal up there, and why a national TV star calling Provo "heavenly" a week earlier didn't go over well on the hill.

Gordon Monson of The Salt Lake Tribune, writing in 2022 about why fans around the country chant obscenities at BYU, put it this way: some people look at the faith's claims and "don't see that as an invitation; they see it as an indictment." He was talking about out-of-state crowds. We'd argue it explains a fair amount closer to home, too.

Those out-of-state crowds have a record of their own. Oregon apologized in 2022. Colorado and Cincinnati apologized in 2025. Colorado State apologized this September. All four were over chants aimed at BYU fans' religion. To be fair, Utah isn't on that list, and plenty of faithful Latter-day Saints bleed red. One of them, a self-described faithful member and "rabid Ute fan," wrote that "religion has far less to do with people picking opposing sides than the media would like you to believe." We think he's half right.

How Pat walked into the middle of it

McAfee didn't pick a side in a 100-year-old family feud on purpose. He just went to Provo first.

Utah fans noticed. The "Baptize Pat!" clips were everywhere that week. When he got to Salt Lake, the university's welcome was a roast, and the kid kicking for his money brought up BYU's $3 million before she even lined up. By Monday, Utah fans on X were posting "We don't care" and "I'm sure the feeling is mutual lol," as Pro Football Network quoted them. One called the whole thing "a W for Utah."

The best reply came from a BYU fan: "As BYU fans, this is all the validation we need. OMG, I feel so validated."

What makes it a shame is that Utah used to have a good thing going with McAfee. After GameDay's 2023 visit for Utah and Oregon, he told ESPN's Adam Schefter he "loved it" and "did not expect it," the Deseret News has reported. Utah fans won the shirtless standoff with him again this time. The crowd was never the problem.

In this state, you can't hug one side without the other side taking it personally. McAfee, a guy from Plum, Pennsylvania, learned that in one week. Most of us needed a lifetime.

The coaches tried

This was supposed to be the year the rivalry grew up.

In July, Utah's new head coach, Morgan Scalley, and BYU's Kalani Sitake stood in front of reporters and preached respect. "I think the Utah-BYU rivalry is one of the best in the country," Scalley said, adding that "it's definitely mutual respect." Sitake: "We've always respected and loved our rivals. I think they feel the same way about us."

Scalley would know about the other way. As a Ute player in 2004, he appeared in a video saying, "You're born either a Ute fan or a BYU fan," The Salt Lake Tribune reported, and by 2017 he said, "I said stupid things when I was a player." Good for him. Utah's head coach grew out of it.

Three months later, his university's Instagram account picked a fight with ESPN.

What Provo got right

Good football gets GameDay to town. Whether it ever comes back has a lot to do with how the morning goes and how the crew feels on the flight home.

Provo let him in on the joke. Provo made him look good: a kid in a Spider-Man suit hit a $3 million kick on national TV, and his pick won. And nobody in Provo took a shot at him, which is the one thing he kept coming back to on Monday.

Forget who's holier. The question is who's the better host, and McAfee already answered it. He called one place "a heavenly place" and said he hopes he never sees the other again. He's not a Latter-day Saint. He's just a guy who knows when he's been welcomed.

Nov. 7: the Holy War just got hotter

BYU (6-1 after the double-overtime loss at UCF) and Utah meet on Saturday, Nov. 7, at Rice-Eccles Stadium. BYU has won three straight in the series: 26-17 in 2021, 22-21 at Rice-Eccles in 2024 and 24-21 in Provo last season. The last time the Cougars won in Salt Lake, the athletic director said the game was stolen and a cheer coach got knocked out by a water bottle.

A challenge for Ute fans, then. Prove McAfee wrong. Be the crowd he said you were: loud, relentless, a great show. Then hang on to your water bottles.

Our Holy War explainer has the history and the series record. First, BYU hosts Arizona State on Halloween (our game-day guide).

More from Provo's GameDay week

• College GameDay in Provo
• Carter Smith's $3 million kick
• BYU 28, Notre Dame 24
• UCF 39, BYU 31 in double overtime

New to McAfee? Start with who Pat McAfee is: the kicker, the punter, the ESPN host and his long history with BYU.