At kickoff, the crowd for Saturday's Utah-Air Force game was only around 17,000, which meant 28,000 empty seats. By halftime, attendance at Rice-Eccles Stadium had risen to around 23,000 — if you count late-comers, players, coaches, officials, media, stray cats and migrating geese.
A perfect autumn football day, the conference opener and nobody came.
On the other hand, would you?
Hello, Utes. Another season, another meltdown, another year of playing for a piece of the championship. A team good enough to create
expectations but not good enough to live up to them. A team that never gives up but often screws up.
By the way, anyone got numbers for the San Francisco and Seattle bowls?
Five games into the season, the Utes find themselves in a scene they know by heart, fighting for a piece for the conference championship but checking the dates of every obscure bowl game available. It's not yet October, but the rough draft of their story is already complete. They will play hard, fight back and get into a postseason bowl game despite themselves. That's largely due to the fact the Mountain West Conference has tie-ins with four bowl games.
They will salvage their pride, but not their dreams.
They will be the Utes they have always been under coach Ron McBride: good enough to command respect, not good enough to strike fear; determined enough to remain a threat, inconsistent enough to blow a 26-6 lead.
They will roll along, readjusting their goals and looking for all the world like the guy in the cartoons who gets knocked senseless but bounds up calling, "I'm all right! I'm OK! I'm fine!"
Except there are a few pieces missing.
Though the situations vary slightly, the results are much the same from year to year. This season they began with wins over Utah State and Indiana, followed by close losses to Arizona and Michigan. Time for guarded optimism. Then comes the conference season, a chance for teams to change gears. It is what keeps fans hoping — the promise of a championship.
This, of course, doesn't fly with Ute fans and never will. They've been down this road too many times. Been through too many seasons in which the Utes looked good, sometimes very good, only to lose a close game or two at the most inopportune times. Often under McBride they have redeemed themselves. He has taken them to six bowl games in 12 years. Part of that is coaching. But part is the preponderance of bowl games. With 28 bowls this year, 56 teams — almost half the Division I programs — will play in the postseason.
Getting a bowl invitation is a bit like winning a four-day, three-night vacation to Cancun. All you have to do is listen to the sales pitch for the condominium.
Meanwhile, Utah fans have become shell-shocked watching games like Saturday's. In a contest which they led by 20 points, they also committed seven fumbles (losing four), two interceptions and one blocked punt.
In the second half they recorded just three first downs and 57 yards offense.
"Our inability to do the right things let them back in the game," said McBride.
In the process, the Utes showed why they couldn't fill their house if they handed out money at the turnstiles. They got nervous, played scared, fumbled handoffs, mismanaged the clock, lost their momentum.
They acted like the Utes.
As usual, the defense was left to fend for itself. It mostly did well, trying to get the team out of bad situations the offense put it in. But nothing was more representative of the Utes' situation than the third-quarter play in which Desmond Davis fumbled a kickoff, retrieved it, and unwisely began to run out of the end zone — until he was wrapped up by a cooler-headed teammate, Bo Nagahi.
That's the story of the Utes.
Sometimes they have to protect themselves from even themselves.
After the game, McBride sat head in hands, a man in complete misery. "In all the games I've coached, this is the worst feeling. All we had to do is take care of business," he said.
Then again, what else is the business of being the Utes?
E-mail: rock@desnews.com