draconian covid regulations imposed by their local blue-state governments.

Last year, Utah was back to their normal selves.

Keep in mind that while they were able to win an extraordinarily weak Pac-12 in 2021-22, they couldn't win an OOC game to save their lives and they kept losing their bowl game to 2nd and 3rd place BIG 10 teams.

They weren't a great P5 team prior to Covid, nor after the covid measures were gone. They had a narrow window on top of the worst P5 (a conference that is no longer P4/5), and that coincided with covid.

Kind of like Army being the top football program during WWII. Only Utah wasn't at the top of the country, just the top of a now relegated conference.