A year off did not alleviate the depth of passion in this rivalry. Our social media feeds are feasts of overconfidence and schadenfreude and the sarcasm flows like wine. BYU is fresh off their best year in the last thirty, of course the one year they didn't get a crack at the Utes. Utah is loaded, a threat in the Pac-12 South, and a smart money pick for the Rose Bowl. There's no shortage of rivalry fodder, but one subject arises again and again.

History.

Your average college football fan is a man in his forties or fifties, someone who came of age at a time when BYU was an ascendant football power under the guidance of one of the greatest college football coaches ever, churning out NFL legends like Steve Young and Jim McMahon. Their recollection of years prior is hazy at best.

Students of the game know that in the first part of the twentieth century, this rivalry was exceptionally lopsided. Not counting the Brigham Young Academy days, these teams played every year starting in 1922 and BYU did not come away with a W until 1941, with an average margin of victory of more than three touchdowns for the Utes. Cougar fans will throw a similar stat in the Ute fan's face: a stretch of football between 1972 and 1992 where the Utes won just twice with an average margin of 20 points in favor of the Cougs.

I endeavored to put this ceaseless debate in a new light the only way I know how - through the gratuitous application of mathematics. I built a metric called 'Dominance Score', a measure of a football game that takes into account both margin of victory and length of winning streak. Then I created a weighted average of these scores, rewarding team for long streaks with impressive margins of victory. The result is a defined picture of the ebbs and flows of the rivalry over the last century.

The historic dominance of the Utes is unmistakable, the greatness of LaVell Edwards undeniable, and the return to consistently superior football by the Utes clearly evident. Coach McBride found the way to go toe-to-toe with LaVell, and Kyle Whittingham (via Urban Meyer) have put the Utes back into Ike Armstrong territory.

I was curious how this story stacked up against the other great college football rivalries, and so I did the same analysis for 21 other storied contests, matchups like Alabama-Tennessee, USC-UCLA, and Army-Navy. They all future huge swings in control, epic coaching matchups, and impressive streaks. Utah's historic dominance over BYU stands out in a few ways:

- Utah is dominant in 66% of the seasons played. Only two of the teams measured are dominant more often, and fully 68% of them are tighter than 60/40.

- The rivalry has had similar highs for each team compared to others, meaning that when the going has been good, it's been really good for both the Utes and the Cougars.

- Of the nearly 2,000 games analyzed, there are only 21 streaks of 9 games or longer. Only 12 times has one of these epic rivalries reached ten wins in a row.

So is it going to be thirteen such streaks by Sunday morning? Is ten coming?

Things look good for the Utes; they already did going into the season with BYU needing to replace an exceptional QB and linchpin offensive lineman, among other major losses, and while it's important not to draw conclusions from 60 minutes of football, their statistical performance against Arizona (a team that projects to be truly abysmal) was poor: their defense gave up 426 yards and 27 first downs, and their 5.84 yards per play on offense puts them in Oregon State territory. Unlike last week, this is a game Utah could potentially lose, but what we've seen gives no reason to predict it.

Utah 34, BYU 24