The P12 had Washington and Oregon at the top in recent years, which I would say were probably better teams than the best of the B12 outside of TX and OU, but the P12 also had a lot of really mediocre to bad teams and that is not something Utah will encounter in the B12 at the same rate.

Colorado (Utah's "rival") hasn't won a bowl game since 2004 and has only had two winning seasons in the last 10 years (they're obviously on an upward trend with Prime now), five of the last six Arizona head coaches were below .500 (Rich Rod was the only exception at .551), Arizona State has had losing seasons three of the last four years but were better before that, Oregon State has been solid the last two years but had eight seasons of losing records before that (which included a 1-11 season in 2017 and a 2-10 in 2018...yikes!). UCLA has been a shell of its former self for a couple of decades now and Chip Kelly was only one game over .500 the last 7 years. Stanford has had losing records 4 of the last 5 years and Cal has had losing records 7 of the last 10.

USC and Utah have been solid as have Oregon and Washington over the last decade or so, but the top 4 P12 teams have won a lot of games against highly mediocre programs during that time. So, while I think Oregon and Washington have probably had stronger programs than the best of the current B12, there just aren't many "gimmie" wins in the B12 like there were in the P12. Frankly, the easiest games in the B12 as currently constituted will be against the "four corners" schools not named Utah, all of which came from the P12. Utah is coming in with a strong team, but Utah fans are in for disappointment if they think they will just waltz through this conference. Sustained success against a larger pool of "good" teams is not going to be easy and might be more difficult than beating a lot of mediocre teams plus a couple of "great" teams. I guess we'll see.