School-sanctioned Rivalry Week activities aren’t always enough for students to show their school pride leading up to the University of Utah vs. Brigham Young University football game. Some students opt to show their spirit in other, often illegal, ways.
BYU police officers are extra vigilant during the weeks surrounding Rivalry Week, Haroon said. Extra officers, armed with radios and binoculars, are staffed throughout campus and work longer hours than normal.
“Typically, the things we experience are red paint on things,” said Michael Haroon of the BYU Police Department.
The pranking has become more tame in recent years, though.
In the book Brigham Young University: A House of Faith, authors Gary James Bergera and Ronald Priddis discuss the history behind the rivalry pranks.
According to the book, BYU initiated the war of pranks in 1939 when students painted the Block U blue and wrote “Scalp Utah” on sidewalks around campus. Not to be outdone, U students retaliated with buckets of red paint and targeted the steps of BYU’s Maeser Building, the school’s sundial and the campus flag pole. U students later returned to paint “The Y is a Girls’ School” on the road to the upper BYU campus.
As time went on, the pranks became more elaborate. In 1956, a giant, lighted Y was displayed on the hill above the block U. Expecting revenge, members from the Intercollegiate Knights, a BYU service and school-spirit club, were put on watch to guard the block Y in Provo. Instead of going after the Y, U students burned a large U into a lawn in the center of campus and tagged “Beat BYU” with red paint on trash cans, sidewalks and road signs.
The pranks escalated three months later when U fraternities got involved. Fraternity members broke into a BYU building and stole the BYU victory bell, which had been mounted on a trailer to facilitate easy transportation to sporting events. The police later found the bell in Salt Lake City. The Cougars responded to the theft by enameling blue “Y’s” on the door posts of a fraternity house.
In 1967, U students doused BYU’s bronze cougar with red paint, along with three buildings on the BYU campus. Several students were apprehended, and each had to pay a $100 fine.
BYU students later organized a group known as “The People’s Front of Provo.” The group orchestrated a prank by dyeing fountains around the U campus blue.
U students responded by painting “BYU sucks” on a BYU administration building, the Marriott Center and a pedestrian overpass.
After BYU destroyed the U team at a football game in the early 1980s, BYU students decided to remind U students of the score, 56-28, by painting it on the pillars of the Park Building and the Huntsman Center. Several students were caught and were forced to pay a total of $1,400 to remove the paint.
In 2004, eight U baseball players were arrested in connection with painting the Y red. After hiking up the hill where the Y is located, the players snapped pictures of themselves as they painted. When pitcher Ryan Breska went to the photo shop to pick up his pictures, the police were there waiting for him, having been tipped off by a photo store employee who saw the pictures. The eight players involved were later charged with second-degree felonies, although prosecutors agreed to reduce the charges to Class A misdemeanors if the players paid more than $6,000 in repair fees and stayed out of trouble.
This September, Y fans decided to leave the traditional blue paint behind when they visited the Block U. Rather than painting cougar prints or other BYU insignia, the fans turned the U into a Y using a favorite prankster ammunition — toilet paper.
Sgt. Lynn Rohland of the U Police Department said the occurrence of pranks has gone down in recent years, and police are grateful for the decline.
If students are contemplating a prank, they need to ask themselves whether it’s a harmless prank or whether it could actually injure somebody or cause property damage, Rohland said.
“Once you get into hurting an individual or causing property damage or destruction, then it’s no longer a prank — it’s criminal,” Rohland said. “There’s a big difference between the two.”
Maegan BurrOn the morning of Sept. 26, the block U was toiliet-papered to give it the shape of a “Y.”. The act was the latest in a long history of pranks between the schools.