Long before Ryan Smith owned the Utah Jazz and the Utah Mammoth, he was a kid outside LaVell Edwards Stadium with a problem to solve. His father, Scott, was a professor at BYU, and on game days the children were dropped off and left to find their own way into the game. Those afternoons in Provo became his first sports memories.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
“We’re all excited about this BYU team…,” BYU alum Smith said on The Pat McAfee Show. “This is a full circle moment for me, and my very first sports memories as a kid were in this stadium right here.”
Notre Dame is coming to town, and both teams are unbeaten. The Fighting Irish are ranked No. 2 at 6-0, and BYU is No. 8 at 5-0. “You can’t draw this up,” Smith said. He credited head coach Kalani Sitake and quarterback Bear Bachmeier for the team BYU has this year.
BYU was never just a stadium to Smith. He was born in Eugene, Oregon, in 1980, when his father taught at the University of Oregon. The family later moved to Provo because his parents thought BYU would be a better place for their five children.
When life got hard, including his parents’ separation and his father’s battle with Stage IV throat cancer, Smith says the school helped. His father took a year off work to be with the kids, and Smith says BYU supported him then and during his treatment. The two later founded Qualtrics together.
“So me supporting BYU is not about sports,” Smith said in a June 2024 interview with KSL Sports. “It’s about how they supported my family when we were going through our craziest times, like probably no employer I’ve ever seen.”
That is why this game feels different to him, and it has a personal twist. His business partner, Ryan Sweeney, has felt the same way about Notre Dame for a long time, and the two have worked together for 15 years. Many of Smith’s friends from that side are coming to Provo. “It’s just meant to be,” he said.
When McAfee asked about the rivalry Notre Dame and BYU have, Smith’s answer was clear.
“No, I don’t think there’s been a rivalry,” said Smith. “I went to the game when we played, I don’t know, in 2012 or 2013, with Taysom Hill, at Notre Dame. It was a special moment, obviously.”
Notre Dame won the last meeting 28-20 in Las Vegas in 2022 and leads the series 7-2. BYU’s last home game against the Irish was a 20-17 win in 2004. This weekend starts a two-year home-and-home series.
ESPN’s College GameDay will broadcast from The Lawn at Heritage Halls from 9 a.m. to noon ET, its second visit to Provo after 2009. Analysts include Rece Davis, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard, Pat McAfee and Nick Saban. Former BYU quarterback Steve Young is the guest picker, and Sitake is scheduled to appear.
McAfee has plenty of good things to say about BYU, too. He praised the players for their maturity, athleticism, and family lives, and said several people from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have left a good impression on him, including his former Colts teammate Austin Collie, a former BYU receiver.
Smith’s role goes beyond cheering, as he is also among the big donors in college sports, along with Mark Cuban at Indiana and Cody Campbell at Texas Tech, and he has backed BYU through funding and NIL. And he is blunt about why.
“Coming from the world that I’m in every day to college sports, let’s just make no mistake about it; it is professional sports. The only difference is in professional sports, we have rules.”
On Saturday, the night comes back to the kid. The one who had to find his way in now backs a game that has the whole sport’s attention, in the same stadium.