For a hundred-odd years, if you lived in Provo and had no connection to Brigham Young University, Homecoming still found you. It found you on a Saturday morning in October when the parade closed University Avenue, when the floats and the marching band and the Cougarettes and a convertible carrying the grand marshal rolled past the Provo Library, and when a few thousand people who had never taken a class at BYU stood on the curb with their kids anyway.
That is over. In spring 2026, BYU retired the Homecoming parade, citing declining participation, and said it would put its energy into student-centered events instead. It is the biggest change to the shape of the week in decades, and it is why this guide exists now: the part of Homecoming that belonged to the whole city is gone, and the parts that remain are worth explaining, because they are less visible from the sidewalk.
Here is what Homecoming week looks like in 2026 — the dates, the game, the Spectacular, the traditions that survive, and how to be part of it whether you are a student, an alum coming back, or a neighbor who just wants to know why the Y is lit on a Tuesday night.
The Dates: October 6-10, 2026
BYU's Homecoming page lists October 6 through 10, 2026, Tuesday through Saturday. That is the frame; the events inside it are published closer to the week on homecoming.byu.edu, the BYU Alumni calendar, and the Student Life and Campus Life calendars.
The weekly rhythm has been stable enough over recent years to sketch, with the caveat that any single event's day and time can move. Tuesday has opened with the Homecoming opening ceremonies in the Marriott Center, a student barbecue, and the evening Hike to the Y. Wednesday and Thursday are the student noondays on the Wilkinson Student Center terrace and Brigham's Square, the True Blue Football game, and various pageants and contests. Thursday brings the college honored-alumni lecture series and, in Spectacular years, the first performance. Friday has held the second Spectacular, alumni barbecue and reunions, and the Homecoming dance. Saturday has been the Cougar Run and Kids Race, the free blue pancake breakfast, the parade, the game, and more reunions.
In 2026, the game is not on Saturday. Read on.
The Game: Friday Night Against Iowa State
The Homecoming football game is Iowa State, Friday, October 9, 2026, 8:15 p.m. Mountain, on ESPN, at LaVell Edwards Stadium.
That is a change from the schedule BYU released in January, which had the game on Saturday, October 10. On April 10, the Big 12 and its television partners announced their Friday-night selections for the season, and BYU-Iowa State was one of them. It is the only weeknight home game of the 2026 season, and it turns Homecoming's Saturday capstone into a Friday-night centerpiece with the traditional Saturday events, if they run, coming the morning after.
A few things are true about this particular game. Iowa State has never lost in Provo — the Cyclones were 3-0 at LaVell Edwards Stadium coming into 2026, and BYU's win in the series came in Ames in 2025, 41-27, the program's first ever against Iowa State. The two teams are the last two Pop-Tarts Bowl champions. And a national ESPN window on a Friday night is the kind of slot the conference hands to games it expects to matter, which is another way of saying tickets will be expensive and the stadium will be full.
Our 2026 season preview has the full schedule, and the Homecoming game is bracketed by the two hardest tickets of the fall: it comes six days after the road trip to TCU and eight days before Notre Dame visits Provo on October 17. If you are choosing one October home game to spend real money on, the Notre Dame game week guide and this one are the two to compare.
For the night itself, the practical guides are the ones we keep for every home game: game day in Provo for the pre-game routine, BYU football parking for where to put the car — and read that one closely, because a Friday game means campus lots that are free on Saturdays are working lots until the evening — and the tickets guide for the face-value and resale math. Students use the ROC Pass.
One more Friday consequence. An 8:15 kickoff overlaps the evening commute, and the game will end near 11:30 p.m. If you live on the east side of Provo and normally ignore game days, this is the one to plan around: University Parkway, 900 East, and the Provo Canyon interchange will be heavy from 5 p.m. on, and again after midnight.
The Parade That Ended
For the record, and because a lot of Provo grew up on it: the BYU Homecoming parade ran for more than a century, and for most of that time it was the most public thing the university did all year. It was the week's one event that took place off campus, on city streets, in front of people who had no ticket and no ID.
The university's announcement in spring 2026 said the parade was being retired because of decreasing participation, and that new student-centered activities — a BYU birthday bash and a Homecoming scavenger hunt were named — would take its place. The blue pancake breakfast, long served along the parade route, moves to the finish of the Cougar Run, which now routes through campus.
If you are looking for the civic, everybody-welcome version of Homecoming that the parade provided, it does not have a direct replacement. The closest things are the game itself, the Spectacular, and simply walking through campus during the week, which is decorated and busy and open. We keep this section short because there is nothing to plan around anymore, but it seemed wrong to write a Homecoming guide that pretended the parade had never existed.
The Spectacular
The Homecoming Spectacular is BYU's variety show, and for many alumni it is the reason to come back. It is staged in the Marriott Center and built around the university's touring performing groups — the Young Ambassadors, Vocal Point, Noteworthy, the Cougarettes, the Ballroom Dance Company, the Dunk Team, the BYU Singers, the Folk Dance Ensemble, Living Legends — usually with a headline guest and the presentation of the year's Alumni Achievement Awards between acts. Tony winner Brian Stokes Mitchell headlined more than once in the 2010s and early 2020s.
The show has historically run two nights, Thursday and Friday, at 7:30 p.m. It was paused for several years and then brought back in October 2025 to mark the university's 150th anniversary, with the two performances falling in the week leading up to the Homecoming game.
Here is the honest state of things for 2026: as of early September, we could not confirm from the university whether the Spectacular returns this year or on which nights. It is the single event in this guide most worth checking on homecoming.byu.edu before you make plans, because it sells through the BYU Ticket Office and the good seats go to alumni groups early. If it runs, expect Thursday and Friday evenings — which in 2026 means the Friday performance would overlap the Iowa State kickoff, so one of those nights is likely to move or the show may run on different days entirely. Confirm before you buy.
Opening Ceremonies and the Founder
Homecoming opens in the Marriott Center with a ceremony that has, for decades, been organized around an "honored founder" — a figure from BYU's history whose life supplies the week's theme. The 2025 ceremony focused on light and the sesquicentennial; earlier years have honored faculty members and early administrators, with themes like "Hold High the Torch." The ceremony is a late-morning event on the opening Tuesday, open to the public, and it is the least-attended and most quietly interesting event of the week for anyone curious about the university's history.
The Hike to the Y
Of all the traditions, this is the one a Provo resident is most likely to notice without meaning to. On a weeknight early in Homecoming week — Tuesday in recent years — students gather in the evening, hike the Y Mountain trail, and light the block Y above campus. From most of the valley floor, the Y that night is a glowing white block on the mountain.
The hike is real. The trail is about a mile and a quarter of switchbacks with roughly a thousand feet of gain, and doing it in the dark with a few hundred students is a different experience from the daylight version. Bring a headlamp, water, and shoes with tread. The trailhead is at the top of the Y Mountain Trailhead road above the east bench, and parking is scarce on the night; students have gathered at the Marriott Center's northeast lot and walked or shuttled. It is a student event, but the trail is public and nobody checks IDs.
Noondays, True Blue Football, and the Student Week
The middle of Homecoming week belongs to the students, and most of it happens between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. on the Wilkinson Student Center terrace, Brigham's Square, and Wilkinson Way. The BYU Student Association runs noonday activities — cookies and chocolate milk, games, appearances by Cosmo, donuts, meet-the-leaders tables — each day of the week. The Baby Pageant, in which students bring baby photos of themselves to be judged, is a fixture. True Blue Football, a shaving-cream-and-tarp slip-and-slide flag football game on Helaman West Field, is the week's signature student spectacle, usually Wednesday at 5 p.m.
The Homecoming dance, in 2025 a formal in the Wilkinson Center ballroom on the Friday evening, is a student-ID event. For a broader picture of how the student calendar works, the BYU student guide covers the year; for the campus itself, the BYU guide is the map.
Reunions and the Alumni Week
For alumni, Homecoming is reunion week, and the university's alumni association organizes it by college and by class. Each college — Engineering, Business, Fine Arts and Communications, Life Sciences, and the rest — has historically hosted an honored-alumni lecture on the Thursday, with an awards reception that evening, and class reunions run all day Friday and Saturday in venues across campus. An alumni barbecue in Brigham's Square has anchored Friday evening.
If you graduated in a year ending in 6 or 1, 2026 is a milestone reunion year, and the college and class events post on the BYU Alumni site with registration. If you are coming from out of town, the hotels near BYU guide is the lodging list, and the two things every returning alum forgets are that the Creamery on 9th is open late and that the Marriott Center parking structure fills before the Spectacular starts.
The Cougar Run and the Blue Pancakes
Saturday morning of Homecoming has traditionally started with the Cougar Run, a 5K, and a Kids Race, followed by a free blue pancake breakfast. With the parade gone, the university has said the pancakes move to the end of the run and the course routes through campus. In past years breakfast has been served at several spots at once — the Creamery on 9th, the Sinclair station at the southeast corner of campus, the Smith Fieldhouse, and Botany Pond — and it is genuinely free to anyone who shows up, which makes it the one remaining Homecoming event a Provo family can do with no ticket, no ID, and no affiliation.
Registration for the run opens on the Homecoming site; the Kids Race is short and the 5K is a real course. Whether the 2026 run stays on Saturday, October 10, the morning after a Friday-night game, is on the university's calendar to confirm.
The Smaller Traditions, Decoded
A few things you will see or hear during the week that nobody explains.
Cosmo. The cougar mascot is at every noonday and most of the week's events, and the Cosmo dunk-team routine is a Spectacular staple. Cosmo's identity is officially a secret, revealed only at graduation.
"Rise and Shout." The fight song, written in 1947, is the thing 60,000 people sing after every score. Homecoming week is when you will hear the pep band play it on the Wilkinson terrace at noon with nobody scoring anything.
The Y itself. The block letter on the mountain dates to 1906, when students set out to spell BYU on the hillside and finished only the Y. It is whitewashed by student volunteers each spring and lit a handful of times a year — Homecoming, graduation, and a few others. The lit Y on Homecoming Tuesday is not a permanent installation; it is strings of lights carried up and taken down.
The colors. Royal blue and white, and on game week, the campus and a good part of east Provo turn that blue. The "True Blue" in True Blue Football is the same phrase the university uses for its alumni loyalty campaign.
The Marriott Center. The 19,000-seat arena hosts the opening ceremonies, the Spectacular, and the Tuesday devotional every week of the year. If you have never been inside, Homecoming week gives you two or three free or cheap reasons.
The honored founder. The person the week is organized around changes each year and is announced in the summer. The theme phrase is printed on the banners, the T-shirts, and the program; if you see a slogan on a lamppost on campus in October, that is where it came from.
Homecoming Week at a Glance
Because the 2026 calendar had not fully posted when this was written, here is the shape of a recent Homecoming week to check against the official schedule when it does.
- Tuesday: Opening ceremonies, Marriott Center, late morning. Student barbecue. Hike to the Y, evening.
- Wednesday: Noonday activities, Wilkinson terrace. True Blue Football, Helaman fields, late afternoon. Baby Pageant.
- Thursday: College honored-alumni lectures, late morning. Noonday. Alumni awards reception. Spectacular, 7:30 p.m., in years it runs.
- Friday: Noonday. Alumni barbecue, Brigham's Square. Spectacular second night. Homecoming dance. Reunions. In 2026, the football game: Iowa State, 8:15 p.m., ESPN.
- Saturday: Cougar Run and Kids Race, blue pancake breakfast, reunions. In prior years, the parade and the game.
The 2026 week is the first in living memory where Saturday is the quiet day.
A Homecoming Plan for Non-Students
If you live in Provo and have no BYU tie, here is the week in three moves.
Walk campus on Wednesday or Thursday around noon. The Wilkinson terrace is at its busiest, the buildings are decorated, and the Bean Life Science Museum and the Museum of Art are open and free. Our campus visitor guide has parking that works on a weekday.
Go to the Spectacular if it runs. It is the best two hours of live performance in Utah Valley for the price, and it is the event that best explains what BYU thinks it is. Buy through the ticket office the week tickets go on sale.
Decide about the game early. Friday, 8:15 p.m., ESPN, Iowa State. Either buy in September and plan the whole evening around it, or plan to watch it at one of the sports bars and restaurants that show BYU games and stay off University Parkway after 5 p.m.
And on Tuesday night, look up at the mountain.
Related Guides
- BYU Football 2026: The Complete Schedule, Home Games, and Season Preview
- BYU vs. Notre Dame 2026: The Game Week Guide
- BYU Football Game Day in Provo
- BYU Football Parking: Where to Park on Game Day
- BYU Football Tickets Guide
- The BYU Student Guide
- BYU Campus Visitor Guide
- BYU Student Sports Tickets: The ROC Pass Explained
Frequently Asked Questions
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