Jon Hatch

Three hours before kickoff today, the visiting fans set up tents at an elementary school outside Orlando and started unloading thousands of pounds of food. None of it was for them. All of it was for students at the school they came to play. The visitors were BYU. The food goes to the Knights Helping Knights Pantry at UCF, which started in 2009 as a class project and is now run by students for students. Last school year it gave out more than 185,000 pounds of food across nearly 60,000 visits. About 400 UCF students walk through it on an ordinary day. Roughly 35% of UCF students say they deal with some level of food insecurity. BYU fans have been doing this at road games since 2019. They call it Cougs Care, and the local alumni chapter picks the charity in whatever city the team is playing in. Last November in Lubbock they ran a book drive with Texas Tech fans for Literacy Lubbock. It was supposed to be one tailgate. It turned into a week. Here is what the Texas Tech side said about that. "Everyone wanted to help, so we decided to make this a weeklong event." They collected more than 6,000 books. Andy Reid went to Brigham Young University. Patrick Mahomes went to Texas Tech. Both of them pushed it online. In Ames, Iowa they collected coats, shoes and blankets, and they did it in the name of a man from Des Moines named Charles Good, who in 1856 gave new boots to a group of children walking west. They were paying back a stranger 169 years later. At East Carolina they filled the Purple Pantry with more than 5,000 pounds. Tyler Stahle of BYU posted pictures from under the tent in Oviedo this afternoon while the food was still coming in. Last season the whole thing brought in 76,500 pounds, which was 15 times what it collected the year before, and the number of people taking part doubled to 26,500. The last time BYU played in Orlando, two years ago, fans left about 2,000 pounds for this same pantry. The tailgate was open to both sides, and UCF fans came and gave to their own pantry alongside them. Be honest about the size of it. One tailgate does not fix a campus where a third of the students are short on food, and the University of Central Florida is one of the largest schools in the country. The drive is also run by BYU's own alumni association, which means it is good for BYU too. And the pantry is not the only thing on that campus that needs filling. BYU lost today. UCF won 39 to 31 in double overtime. The food was already stacked on the tables by then. The cans were counted, the bags were loaded, and none of those people knew yet whether they had driven across the country to watch their team lose. They handed it over before they knew. When was the last time somebody did something for you with nothing in it for them. Thanks to @tstahle15 for sharing this story!