and they benefited from playing in a soft PAC-12, which was terrible until literally 2022 when a couple of teams decided to actually play football. And Utah was given the luckiest break ever by not having to play Washington that year, who was actually the best team in that conference and probably would have beaten Penn State.

Utah will probably finish with 5 or 6 losses this year, and they finished with 5 losses last year, and 4 losses the two years before that.

This is not a huge drop-off, it’s simply them getting exposed by not getting to play teams that are actual trash, but the media refused to admit they were trash (The PAC-12 south of USC, UCLA, Arizona, Colorado, and ASU were all trash for the past decade. And most of them still are. Coach Prime has worked a miracle).

A team coached by a lamp with a QB who could complete a few screen passes per game could have won the PAC-12 south every year the last decade without much trouble.