BYU vs Colorado State: Apology Over Derogatory Chants
A football game should bruise a record, not a faith.
Beatrice Kensington5 min readThe night in Fort Collins turned uglier than the scoreboard
BYU’s 41-23 win over Colorado State should have been remembered for the Cougars holding their place among the unbeaten and for a road crowd that understood it was watching a real contender. Instead, the night left a stain that no box score can scrub away. The university issued an apology after derogatory chants aimed at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came from the stands, an episode that dragged faith, identity and basic decency onto a football field where they never belonged.
There are losses that sting and losses that linger. This was something worse: a moment that made everybody smaller.
BYU’s rise brings attention, and not always the kind you want
BYU does not walk into opposing stadiums as some anonymous program tucked neatly into the background. The Cougars are ranked, relevant and, in this season, rather hard to ignore. That visibility brings the usual sports heat — noise, hostility, the old habit of trying to rattle a visitor — but it also exposes the sharper edges of fandom. When a crowd crosses from heckling into religious mockery, the game stops being a game in any meaningful sense.
And yet this is part of the modern bargain for schools with a national profile, especially one as distinct as BYU. The football team carries the school’s name, yes, but also the weight of what that name represents. The Cougars have long had to navigate a landscape where their opponent is not just a defense or a secondary, but assumption itself. Saturday’s chants were not merely rude. They were an ugly reminder that some people still confuse opposition with permission.
Rivalry should sharpen the edge of the competition, not turn a crowd into a mob.
Colorado State’s apology was necessary, but the burden is bigger than a statement
Credit to Colorado State for moving quickly to apologize. That matters. Institutions reveal themselves in the first hours after embarrassment, when the easiest instinct is denial, vagueness or the limp old promise to “review the matter.” An apology is the minimum, not the finish line, but the minimum is still worth measuring in an era when too many schools wait until a clip circulates widely enough to force their hand.
The real test is not the sentence on the website. It is whether the school treats this as a public-relations incident or a culture problem. The difference is everything. If the response stops at regret, the next crowd learns nothing. If it becomes a teaching moment, a disciplinary standard and a clear message about what will not be tolerated, then the apology has a pulse.
That is what this should become: not an argument over optics, but a line in the sand.
The larger college-sports problem sits right under the lights
I have watched enough college football to know the myth we tell ourselves every autumn: that the stadium is a cathedral and the crowd is somehow ennobled by the ritual. Usually, the ritual is lovely. The songs, the color, the family photos, the old alumni with their creased hats and weathered loyalties — it can feel like one of the last communal rooms in American life. But the same density that creates belonging can also breed cruelty, especially when a visiting team carries a religious, regional or cultural identity that invites the lazy and the malicious to mistake difference for weakness.
What happened in Fort Collins is not isolated in the broad sense, even if each incident has its own rotten particulars. Sports have always offered cover for behavior people might never excuse in daylight. A crowd, after all, is a convenient hiding place. That is why these episodes matter so much: they tell us not just about the fans who shouted, but about the passivity that often surrounds them until the damage is done.
And yes, there is a football implication here too. Week 2 fantasy football lineup advice can wait; what cannot wait is the recognition that college athletics increasingly sits at the intersection of entertainment, identity and institutional responsibility. The stadium is not separate from the campus. It is the campus, for a few loud hours, rendered in public.
What this means for BYU, Colorado State and everyone watching
For BYU, the win still counts, and its place in the rankings remains intact. Good teams have a way of surviving bad nights around them. But there is a human cost to being the school that gets turned into a punch line by strangers in the stands. Players hear it. Families hear it. Recruits notice. So do parents deciding where their sons and daughters will spend four years of their lives.
For Colorado State, this is about more than damage control. It is about whether the athletic department can make plain that hostility toward a visitor’s faith is not some regrettable but harmless overflow of passion. It is misconduct. Full stop. The university has an obligation to protect the atmosphere inside its own stadium, not merely to apologize after the fact.
And for the rest of us, this should be a warning against the easy shrug. College football is emotional by design. That is part of the bargain. But emotion is not a license to degrade somebody else’s beliefs, heritage or humanity because they happen to be wearing the wrong colors on the wrong Saturday.
The win belongs to BYU. The shame does not. That burden sits squarely where it landed, in the stands.
The next home crowd gets a choice. Act like it.
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