Steve Young is headed back to Provo, and he’ll do it in familiar fashion: as College GameDay’s guest picker for Saturday’s showdown between No. 2 Notre Dame and No. 8 BYU.
Pat McAfee announced the selection Thursday on his ESPN show, giving the network’s flagship college football program a BYU legend for the first top-10 game ever played at LaVell Edwards Stadium. The Irish and Cougars kick off at 7:30 p.m. ET on ABC.
Young’s connection to BYU runs deep. The Greenwich, Connecticut, native took over as the Cougars’ starter after Jim McMahon and steered BYU to an 11-1 finish in 1983. That season he led the country with 33 touchdown passes, captured the Davey O’Brien Award, was named a unanimous All-American and finished second in Heisman Trophy voting.
BYU later honored him in a major way, retiring his jersey 20 years later and hanging his No. 8 banner at the stadium where Saturday’s game will be played. He was the first football player in program history to receive that distinction.
His college resume was only the beginning. Young spent 13 of his 15 NFL seasons with the San Francisco 49ers and won league MVP honors in 1992 and 1994.
He also threw a Super Bowl-record six touchdown passes in Super Bowl XXIX, earning MVP honors in the game. His Hall of Fame path followed soon after, with enshrinement in the College Football Hall of Fame in 2001 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005.
Young’s return to ESPN also adds another layer to the moment. He was laid off by the network on June 30, 2023, in a round of cuts that affected roughly 20 on-air personalities after more than two decades there, most recently as a regular on Monday Night Countdown.
Now he’ll be back on the set with Rece Davis, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard and Nick Saban. Herbstreit and Howard were also part of GameDay’s 2009 trip to Provo, when former BYU coach LaVell Edwards occupied the guest-picker chair.
ESPN chose Provo over Ohio State at Indiana, making the trip for a matchup it clearly couldn’t pass up: the first top-10 game ever played at LaVell Edwards Stadium. Notre Dame also brings the highest-ranked opponent to that stadium since No. 1 USC visited in 2004.
That same 2004 season produced Notre Dame’s last trip to Provo, a 20-17 BYU win in the opener. The Cougars’ last GameDay appearance in town came in 2009, when they lost 38-7 to TCU.
Both teams missed the 12-team Playoff last season, but they’ve been rolling since the start of 2024. BYU is 28-4 over that span, while Notre Dame is 30-4.
Saturday’s matchup brings plenty of form, too. Bear Bachmeier leads unbeaten BYU after the Cougars’ 24-10 win over Iowa State, while CJ Carr is coming off a Notre Dame offense that put up 58 points in a blowout of Stanford. GameDay will broadcast from 9 a.m. to noon ET on ESPN from the lawn at Heritage Halls on the east side of BYU’s campus.
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Scheduling friction has been part of the backdrop all along, from Notre Dame previously backing out of a planned trip to Provo to the schools working through a neutral-site meeting in Las Vegas in 2022. Recently, Notre Dame reached out about a two-game series, a move tied in part to the Irish needing a game that could help strengthen their playoff resume after USC backed out of their rivalry, giving BYU another high-profile opening in a series that has not always been easy to pin down. [Read more 🡒]