The state’s three Football Bowls Subdivision programs had just clocked in with 31 combined wins, placement for each inside the Top 25 of the college football season’s final rankings and multiple conference championships, as well as the corresponding postseason bowl-berths and the like.
At the Football Championship Subdivision level, a prominent in-state program would foreshadow its national arrival on the horizon with an upset of the sport’s No. 2-ranked team with, at the time, the sport’s most high-octane offense.
Sure, there’s good football all over this incomparable country, but here’s one undeniable element: Utah, aka the ‘Beehive State,’ measures up with virtually anywhere as a college football hotbed.
“I don’t really care to let everybody know about it; we can keep it under for a little bit longer, that would be helpful to me,” BYU head coach Kalani Sitake deadpanned in his office during a visit last week with FootballScoop. “I think we have a really good thing going on in the state, there’s good football in the state -- from not just the FBS but the FCS schools as well.”
The facts don’t lie. Utah has won the past two Pac-12 Conference crowns and vied for the league crown the last four complete FBS seasons.
In his first season at Utah State in 2021, Blake Anderson guided the Aggies to an 11-win campaign and Mountain West Championship crown.
BYU is transitioning this season into its Big 12 membership after playing an independent, nationwide schedule; the Cougars have won 29 games the past three seasons and nearly had a case to become College Football Playoff interlopers in 2020.
Weber State dusted off then-No. 2 Eastern Washington in 2021 as prelude to a 2022 campaign that saw the Wildcats post a 10-win season, upset Utah State and advance to the FCS Playoffs’ Round of 16. Southern Utah capped last season with a modest two-game winning streak, and Utah Tech dispatched nationally-ranked Stephen F. Austin in the fall.
After he helped the program regroup from a troubling start to win five of its final seven regular-season games last fall to secure a bowl berth, Anderson, for one, believes his Aggies program can climb even higher.
Like, College Football Playoff heights.
“I think the Mountain West has proven it’s a really, really good league,” Anderson told FootballScoop, “and if you take the top six conference champions who are going to get into the Playoffs, I absolutely 100% know that the Mountain West is in the top six. So, why not us? Why not Utah State?
“Nobody thought we could win the conference championship in Year 1, and we did. As we develop and recruit and just continue to grow, I’d like to think we’re going to be in that picture and conversation every year. That’s saying a lot, but why not us? Why not us win the league and get into the playoff and make our run at it? Why not us? That’s our plan, is to play for championships and win a championship and get in the playoff. I don’t know that there’s any reason that we can’t, other than the fact that we’re playing against great teams and we’re going to have to beat some really good teams to get there. But we’ve proven along the way that we’ve been able to find a way to get that done at times.”
Utah has rested on the cup of the CFP in recent years, and the Utes a year ago thwarted outgoing Pac-12 rival USC’s Playoff dream with their physically dominating beatdown of the Trojans in the league’s title bout.
No program anywhere in college football – not even staid Iowa, with FBS coaching dean Kirk Ferentz – can match the Utes’ unrelenting stability and consistency under Kyle Whittingham, whose upcoming 19th season as program head coach also marks his 30th consecutive in the program.
There’s ample reason to believe this also is just a bit of a dawn for ongoing elite college football success in Utah. It ranked among the 10-fastest growing states in population per census estimates over the previous year; Utah has continued to emerge among the nation’s most significantly expanding population centers since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 as a top-three growth state.
Sitake sees that trend further burnishing the state’s gridiron depth. In addition to seeing numerous players sign with BYU, Utah and Utah State in the past three classes, Ohio State, Oregon, Baylor, Clemson, USC, Nebraska, Texas, Oregon State, Stanford and Washington State are among other Power-5 programs in landing some of Utah’s best prep prospects.
“I think what’s changing is that it’s one of the fastest-growing states in the country, so that’s changing a little bit, but that’s been happening for the last decade,” Sitake said. “It’s been happening a lot more than people think. For me, I brag about it, the economy in this county (Provo is the seat of Utah County, the state’s second-most populated county) is one of the best in the country. It makes sense that people are going to move here; there’s a lot of area for growth.
“So what happens is when you bring more people, there’s more players possibly. So that, No. 1, was what I noticed. I also noticed the change in the quality of coaches, too; high school coaches and young people who are getting into coaching. Little league all the way up to high school, it’s amazing how knowledgeable the coaches are. Take a place like Texas, which is known for taking care of its coaches, but for here, there’s just been a huge uptick in coaches that actually know the game really well.”