Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig hec.utah.edu. NS
Answer
hec.utah.edu. 1 NS ns2.inscc.utah.edu.
hec.utah.edu. 1 NS ns1.inscc.utah.edu.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0