Utah Football: If It is Jon Hays, How Far Can We Go

Ok first, Jordan Wynn just has a slightly sore/tired arm.  I fully believe that until its time not to believe it, say if I’m writing this same post next Saturday.  So hold the alarm bells.  But at the same time, it would be foolish not to look at the possibility of what would happen if it’s Jon Hays.  Because it looks like Mr. Hays will be the #2.

Now what concerns me about that is, Hays was extremely limited last year.  Personally, I think if we hadn’t had Norm Chow calling the plays and designing an offense that would work around those limitations, we’d have easily had a losing record.  Everyone keeps selling me that he’s gotten so much better, but I have to ask how much better could he get?

And that is the problem, the Johnson/Roderick offense isn’t the Chow offense and those guys, who I have a great deal of love for, aren’t Norm Chow.  The prospects that Hays can execute the nuances of this offense trouble me.  This isn’t hand to John White, or pass plays with one option.  My fear is we’ll have an offense he can’t run or we’ll be hopelessly one dimensional like we were at times last year (which cost us the CU game and nearly the Wazzu game).

So what happens if this Wynn thing is something.

We still win the first two games.  BYU would become more of a question mark and we’d need not to turn the ball over, but I still think our defense would get us through.  I think our defense would be enough to get us by the lesser teams, Arizona St., UCLA, OSU, Wazzu, Arizona, and we’d give Colorado payback.  But if Hays has turn over problems, one would figure we’d give one of those back maybe two, so 5-1/4-2 in those games, 8-1/7-2 overall.

However I don’t think we’d have enough offense to do anything against USC or Washington.  That leaves us at 8-3/7-4 overall.  The Cal game would be closer but I think you’d have to give it to Cal based upon what happened last year.  Say 8-4/7-5.  And that would be best case, a couple of things go wrong and we’re looking at .500 or worse.

And that would be good enough to get us to Vegas, but with a team that has much bigger dreams, it would be a little sad.