Utah Utes Football: Late Night/Early Morning OSU Thoughts

So its 5AM and I haven’t really been to bed because I love you people and I work that hard.  I watched Arizona dismantle Washington, then took care of some other issues, then watched Utah v Oregon St. on replay.  I had a brief look at twitter before doing so, and I assumed that it was the worst performance in the history of worst performances.

Then I watched the game, and man I don’t know what some of you folks are freaking out about.

Yeah, we lost, and we had our chances to actually win this football game.  And that in an of itself sucks.

But I look at this football team from where they were at Utah St., to Arizona St., USC, UCLA and here and this football team is an order of magnitude better.  The O-line isn’t awesome, but they aren’t an abortion anymore either.  Travis Wilson played  a good game and if he had been helped out a bit more instead of drops well…  And for the most part I liked what Brian Johnson did.  Hell even the defense was improved.

But success and failure in the Pac-12 is a much closer line than it was in the MWC.  You can’t have red zone  failures in the Pac-12.  You must make field goals in the Pac-12.  You can’t make stupid mistakes in the Pac-12.  You can’t give up a first down when you have the other team at First and 25 in the Pac-12.

On the other side, UCLA and now Oregon St. are both very good football teams and we’ve stood in with both of them.  I’m not pretty confident in beating Cal and I don’t hate our shot of getting four out of five, especially after watching Arizona curb stomp Washington.

The things I’d ask the football Gods to grant us as of now…

– How about some short fields.  It seems like all year long we start every possession at the 20.  If we only ever had 50 yards to go instead of 80, things might get better.

– I realize the above is because the defense struggles to get teams off the field and doesn’t generate turnovers.  So doing this would be nice.

– I hope for the wisdom that Brian Johnson can keep doing what he’s doing because it’s coming.  300 yards of offense, the team is sustaining drives and beginning to look like an offense.

– To grant some patience to some of our fans.  We all should have realized this jump was going to be harder than we thought.  Every problem we’ve had, they all look like they’re in the process of being addressed.  Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is a team that has to take the step up we have.

I think we’re closer to being there than not.