win. They lost at Oregon, which gave them their 3rd conference loss and essentially eliminated them from the conference championship.
Then somebody discovered “hey wait, if A beats B, C beats D, and E beats F…Utah could still get in!” And everyone was like “yeah sure, fat chance.”
And then somehow the stars aligned in the 11th hour, and everything that had to happen, happened.
It was 100% not dependent on Utah, they had no control of their own destiny at all. That’s literally the definition of being lucky—when you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, but things work out for you anyway.
So no, I’m not budging on this one. They didn’t do what they had to do, they didn’t win the games they were supposed to win, and they didn’t even have to play Washington at all. AND they changed the conference championship game rules the year before to allow Utah to get in at all, or else it actually would have been Washington. The amount of stars that had to align was absolutely insane.