It’s no secret that BYU Football has a passionate fanbase. Fans dressed in blue and white show up and fill Lavell Edwards Stadium for home games. However, it’s BYU’s away support that has stunned the nation. Cougar Nation has bought many away tickets and shown up in droves. (Just ask Baylor and UCF, who saw a big portion of their stadium filled with Blue and White). BYU fans have been praised for years for being able to travel, but the truth is, that the Cougars have fans everywhere. No matter where the Cougars play, there are tons of passionate BYU fans ready to make it feel like a home game in Provo.
Part of being such a big school is that you can grow your fanbase quickly. As more and more students attend BYU and graduate, the fanbase spreads across the country and grows. BYU has had a lot of fans at away games for a long time, but this season it seems like the Cougars are packing more numbers into visiting stadiums and confusing home teams by making it unusually loud when opponents are on offense. This leads to procedural penalties and sloppy mistakes that usually result in turnovers. At LaVell Edwards Stadium, this is known as the ROC effect, named after the BYU student section in the southeast corner of the stadium. But when BYU is away, the home team is not used to loud crowd noise, which makes it harder to operate.
BYU fans against UCF were estimated to be around 30-40 percent of the crowd. It seemed that Cougar Nation had overtaken the east stands with ESPN play-by-play commentator Mike Couzens commenting that BYU was significantly getting louder as the UCF fans left, at one point mentioning that it had turned into a BYU home game. Against Baylor, BYU fans had claimed the entire southeast side of McLane Stadium as well as significant territory in the upper levels.
BYU also overtook War Memorial Stadium in Laramie, Wyoming, and Gerald J. Ford Stadium in Dallas, Texas in smaller amounts, even though there was still a lot of Cougar Blue. BYU found a way to get the away fans involved and put pressure on the opponent to fight through the unexpected noise. If BYU continues to fill opposing stadiums, then they could be a hard team to beat, with the royal blue of Cougar Nation behind them.
