BYU upsets Notre Dame 28-24: No. 8 BYU beat No. 2 Notre Dame 28-24 at LaVell Edwards Stadium in Provo on Saturday night, as quarterback Bear Bachmeier threw for one touchdown, ran for two and caught a fourth — accounting for every Cougar score — before BYU's defense stopped CJ Carr's final pass inside the 10-yard line with four seconds left and the home crowd stormed the field.
Provo / Four touchdowns, one goal-line stand, and a field storm
PROVO, Utah — BYU upsets Notre Dame 28-24 is the headline, but it does not quite carry the shape of the game. BYU (6-0) led 21-10 at halftime, watched that lead dissolve into a 24-21 deficit with 9:31 to play, threw an interception that should have ended it, and still won — because its quarterback refused to let the night belong to anyone else, and because its defense held on the last play of the game, at its own nine-yard line, with the No. 2 team in the country four seconds from erasing everything.
The start: BYU throws the first three punches
The tone was set 151 seconds in, and not by a score. Notre Dame defensive lineman Boubacar Traore — the Irish leader in sacks and tackles for loss — was ejected for targeting after a helmet-to-helmet hit on Bachmeier, a loss the nation's top-ranked defense never quite replaced. BYU's opening drive went 75 yards in 11 plays, Bachmeier finishing it himself with a five-yard touchdown run up the middle for a 7-0 lead. Spencer Porath's 46-yard field goal got Notre Dame on the board, and the Irish briefly led 10-7 in the second quarter — their only lead until the fourth — before Bachmeier's night turned from good to singular: he caught a touchdown pass to restore the lead at 14-10, then ran for his second rushing touchdown as the Cougars built a 21-10 halftime advantage. Notre Dame's half ended in the sequence that will haunt it: Carr, driving for a score in the final seconds, tried to spike the ball with six seconds left — and the play was ruled a fumble. No points. An 11-point hole. A stadium shaking.
The comeback: 14 straight points, and an interception that should have ended it
Notre Dame's second half was, for 25 minutes, a masterclass in staying alive. The Irish chipped: a muffed BYU punt, recovered by Bubba Frazier, became a 31-yard Porath field goal and 21-13. A failed BYU fake punt handed Notre Dame the ball at the Cougars' 23, and Porath struck again — 21-16 heading into the fourth quarter. Then the haymaker: a nine-play, 68-yard drive finished by Jonaz Walton's three-yard touchdown run, and Walton again on the two-point conversion, for Notre Dame's first lead since the second quarter, 24-21, with 9:31 to play. When cornerback Jayden Sanders intercepted a deep Bachmeier pass at the Notre Dame 15 moments later, the Irish had the ball, the lead and the clock. One more score ends it. BYU's defense forced the punt instead — the least celebrated, most important series of the night.
The finish: 55 yards, one freshman-named drive, four seconds
What followed is the drive BYU will show recruits for a decade. Taking over near midfield after a strong punt return, Bachmeier moved the Cougars 55 yards in 10 plays and 3:56 — the key throw a 26-yard strike to Legend Glasker that put BYU in the red zone. A false start at the one-yard line pushed the winning play back to third-and-goal from the six, and Bachmeier found tight end Walker Lyons — who finished with five catches for 49 yards — for the touchdown and a 28-24 lead with 1:47 left. It still was not over. Carr, who threw for 261 yards without a touchdown pass all night, produced the best drive of his game when nothing else would do: a fourth-and-3 conversion, a 24-yard completion to Greathouse, a toe-tap sideline catch by Jordan Faison at the 19, a fourth-and-5 conversion, and finally first-and-goal from the nine with four seconds remaining. His last throw, to Greathouse in the end zone, fell incomplete. USA Today's live report noted BYU "may have gotten away with a pass interference, but the flag wasn't thrown." The South Bend Tribune's instant analysis put the Irish view plainly: a season that had been "seemingly headed" for the No. 1 ranking flipped, in minutes, into "a crushing defeat." Both descriptions can be true of the same play. The fans rushing the field were not waiting for a ruling on either.
Why this matters
Start with the arithmetic of the College Football Playoff, because that is what a top-10 game in mid-October is actually about. Notre Dame, an independent with no conference championship game to repair its résumé, entered at 6-0 with what the pregame models treated as a near-lock playoff position — Pro Football Network's meter put the Irish at 95.3 percent before kickoff, and a loss still left them at a projected 87.8 percent. That cushion is real, but it is not the story: Notre Dame's remaining margin is now one game, and its November meeting with unbeaten Miami has quietly become close to an elimination game. BYU's side of the ledger is the mirror image. The Cougars were the team with everything to gain — the same meter moved them from 59.7 percent to a projected 75.4 percent with a win — and they gained it the only way that persuades a committee: not by surviving a peer, but by beating a top-two team, at home, coming from behind in the fourth quarter, with their best player producing the kind of line that gets read out loud on selection shows. A quarterback who throws for a touchdown, runs for two and catches a fourth has not just won a game. He has authored the single most replayable individual performance of the season so far, in the season's loudest window, on national television.
There is a second, quieter significance. This fixture exists because of last December's snub: BYU and Notre Dame were the first two teams left out of the 12-team playoff, both were invited to the Pop-Tarts Bowl, Notre Dame declined and ended its season, BYU played and beat Georgia Tech — and, as USA Today reported, a call from Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua in the aftermath produced this home-and-home series. Saturday night was, in effect, the playoff game the bracket denied both schools a year ago, staged eleven months late in front of a GameDay crowd — College GameDay's first visit to BYU since 2009, with the cheapest secondary-market tickets pushed into the $400s before kickoff. The rematch in South Bend next season now carries a grudge, a scoreline and a storyline, which is to say it carries everything college football sells.
How we got here
The history made the atmosphere, and the atmosphere made the start. Notre Dame led the series 7-2 across nine previous meetings and had won the last four, most recently 28-20 in Las Vegas in 2022 — the first ranked win of Marcus Freeman's tenure. But the Irish had not played in Provo since 2004, when BYU won 20-17, and a generation of Cougar fans had grown up hearing about that night rather than living it. Kalani Sitake's team also arrived short-handed in the one place it could least afford: starting running back LJ Martin, the Cougars' season rushing leader, was out, which pushed still more of the offense onto Bachmeier — and, in the event, onto Preston Rex, who led BYU's ground game with 66 yards on 10 carries. Notre Dame, by contrast, arrived as close to whole as a contender gets, with unanimous All-American cornerback Leonard Moore back from concussion protocol. The Irish were favored by 10.5 points, with a moneyline of -425: the market's verdict was that this was a test Notre Dame would pass. For three quarters of the second half, the market looked right. Markets do not play the last 1:47.
Who gains, who loses
BYU gains a flagship win and a Heisman-adjacent quarterback. At 6-0, with a win over the No. 2 team in the country, the Cougars hold the Big 12's best playoff card and a signature October victory no rival in their conference race can match this month. Bachmeier's line — 23 of 36 for 224 yards and a touchdown passing, 45 yards and two touchdowns rushing, a 15-yard touchdown catch, one interception — is the rare stat line that is also a narrative: voters and committees remember players who do everything in the biggest game.
Notre Dame loses its margin, not its season. At 6-1 the Irish remain, on every credible projection, a playoff team if they win out. What they have lost is the right to a bad Saturday — and they have lost it with the hardest part of their schedule, including unbeaten Miami in early November, still ahead of them. Carr's night will be debated in South Bend for weeks: 261 yards, no touchdown passes, the spike-turned-fumble that cost the Irish points before halftime, and a final drive that was brilliant for 80 yards and incomplete for the last nine.
The Big 12 gains what it is always accused of lacking. The conference's playoff argument usually rests on depth and chaos. It now rests, this week at least, on a top-two scalp taken head-on in primetime — in a Week 7 that had already seen Ohio State snap Indiana's 22-game winning streak 19-15 earlier on Saturday, reshuffling the top of the sport twice in one day.
What the numbers say
The box score explains both halves of the story. BYU outscored Notre Dame 21-10 before halftime and was outscored 14-3 after it, until the final drive — a game of two distinct games, divided by adjustments: Notre Dame's defense, minus Traore, finally slowed Bachmeier's designed runs, while BYU's defense bent through two field-goal drives and one touchdown drive without breaking a second time. The kicking line is the hidden margin: Porath was perfect — three field goals and an extra point, 10 of Notre Dame's 24 points — yet every one of those field goals was also a red-zone or short-field opportunity that ended three points short of a touchdown, most painfully the drive that began at the BYU 23 after the failed fake punt and produced only three. Notre Dame's ground game outperformed its reputation on the night — Nolan James Jr. carried 16 times for 77 yards and a touchdown — but the Irish finished without a single touchdown pass, and in a four-point loss the arithmetic is unforgiving: one more conversion, anywhere, changes the result. The total, 52 points, cleared the 46.5 over/under — a final insult for anyone who trusted the two top-10 defenses to keep it low.
What happens next
BYU's task now is the oldest one in the sport: survive being the hunted. A 6-0 team with a top-two win will get every opponent's best week from here to December, and the Cougars' playoff position, for all Saturday's gains, still runs through a Big 12 race that punishes a single flat Saturday. Notre Dame's task is narrower and harder: win out, starting with a schedule that no longer forgives, and let the Miami game become the argument that replaces the one Provo took away. Freeman's program has been here in miniature before — the 2022 win over BYU in Las Vegas launched his first season's credibility; Saturday's loss in Provo tests his fourth season's. And somewhere in the middle of it all is a return fixture in South Bend in 2027 that, as of about 11:20 p.m. Eastern on Saturday night, became one of the most anticipated regular-season games on the future calendar. Four seconds, nine yards, no flag. College football does not write them much better than that.
Sources: USA Today, Oct. 17, 2026 (live updates: final-play sequence, Lyons winning touchdown, Walton touchdown and two-point conversion, Porath field goals); South Bend Tribune, Oct. 17, 2026 (final score and drive details, series history, 2022 Shamrock Series) and its instant analysis; USA Today College Sports Wire Week 7 HQ, Oct. 17, 2026 (BYU holds on, field rush, Miami and Tennessee results); Sportradar, Oct. 17, 2026 (quarter scoring, Bachmeier 23/36 for 224 yards with rushing and receiving lines, Carr 27/49 for 261 yards, Lyons 5 catches for 49 yards, James 77 rushing yards, kicking lines). Verification note: the final score, the 1:47 winning touchdown, the final-play incompletion and all player statistics above are each carried by at least two of the sources listed; the disputed pass-interference question on the final play is reported as disputed, with no flag thrown. Related on Signal Post News: Ohio State's Jeremiah Smith record day against Iowa · Michigan stunned by Minnesota in the Little Brown Jug · Premier League Matchweek 7.