No. 8 BYU beat No. 2 Notre Dame 28-24 on Saturday night at LaVell Edwards Stadium, and the game ended with one final snap hanging over everything that came before it. In a finish built for the biggest stage, BYU survived the closing seconds of a national showcase that started with College GameDay and ended under ABC primetime coverage.
The win gave BYU its highest-ranked victory since the Cougars knocked off No. 1 Miami in 1990, which is why this result already sits near the top of the program’s modern history. Kalani Sitake said afterward that he was “really happy with the win” and called it “a great game,” while also crediting Notre Dame for coming to Provo and making the night feel like the sort of matchup college football rarely gives back.
Bear Bachmeier was the center of it all. He threw for 224 yards on 23 completions in 36 attempts, found Walker Lyons for a touchdown pass in the fourth quarter, ran for two scores, and even caught a touchdown on a double pass. That made him the first FBS player in the past 30 years to record a rushing touchdown, passing touchdown and receiving touchdown against an Top-5 team in the same game, and the first Cougar to do that in any BYU game since Steve Young in the 1983 Holiday Bowl.
BYU did not win only because of offense. The defense kept CJ Carr from finding the end zone through the air and held him to a 55% completion percentage, with Cade Uluave leading the way with nine tackles. Raider Damuni added seven tackles in his first game back since the season opener against Utah Tech, a return that gave BYU another steady presence as the game tightened in the fourth quarter.
Yet the night was not clean. Sitake said the fake punt was on him, a blunt admission that sits awkwardly inside a victory this big. He said he thought BYU had a good call, but Notre Dame had a better one, then added that he was glad it worked out in BYU’s favor. That is the kind of detail that keeps a game from becoming a simple highlight reel: the Cougars won, but one of the riskiest decisions of the night almost helped turn the result the other way.
Notre Dame won the coin toss and chose to let BYU start on offense, and Boubacar Traore was ejected after a roughing-the-passer penalty with targeting on Bachmeier. Those moments mattered, but they still did not settle the game. What settled it was BYU making the last meaningful play, then surviving the next one, and that is why the result will be remembered less as a ranking upset than as a victory that demanded everything right at the end.
