The Utah Utes and BYU Cougars are bitter college football rivals. They share a state, and they’ve played a lot of nasty, entertaining games since they first met up on the gridiron in 1922. They call the rivalry the Holy War, and it’s a great series.
At Utah, not even Pepsi can wear BYU blue
This is a new one, even for the Holy War.
Utah is entering into a sponsorship with PepsiCo, ditching that company’s own rival, Coca-Cola. But here is the thing: Utah’s color is red, and BYU’s color is royal blue. Pepsi’s base color is also royal blue. So we’re in for a perverse future, one in which Utah’s campus beverage partner is cloaked in the same color as its chief rival.
The plot thickens, though: Pepsi is ditching most of its royal blue coloring for drinks sold on the Utes’ campus in Salt Lake City, KSL reports.
How’s this going to look in practice? It’ll apparently be simple, with Pepsi’s logo remaining unchanged but the blue background on cans and bottles going away.
The school says it didn’t dream this up as some kind of slight at its rival.
“We never asked Pepsi to remove blue from their logo — never a discussion on that. But what we did ask and collaborate with them on is that we develop a concealment that’s conducive to campus, which means a little flexibility from Pepsi and a little flexibility from us,” said Brett Eden, a contract manager for the university’s auxiliary services. “These co-branded machines and the artwork will include a Pepsi logo — their red and blue logo — but the backgrounds will be different.”
Code Red Mountain Dew, another Pepsi soft drink, will be “prominently branded throughout campus.” That’s the most Utes-colored soft drink of all.
Many Utah people do not care about BYU, they might tell you, and there would be no better way to prove how disaffected they are than to strip BYU’s color off their soda cans in a move that’s absolutely not related to BYU.
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