What I think about the 2025 football season

Honestly, I do expect Utah to compete for the conference championship this year, and I think everyone else should, too!!

It’s not like we’re moving from a group of five to a power four conference.

I fully expect Utah to have a solid bounce back season and definitely be right there at the end with a chance to win the championship and advance to the playoffs.

The coaching staff is in place! The players are there! The history is there! The knowledge of how to do it is there! Why not now?!

What worries me the most about our passing game isn’t the lack of experience at WR. It’s the experience our presumed starter has at throwing INTs.

I watched our Spring game on ESPN+, and thought that Dampier was just “pretty good”. He wasn’t “great”. And nobody behind him looked capable of leading us to Arlington in December.

Travis Wilson and Tyler Huntley looked “pretty good” when they’d finally started, but both of them progressed to “great”-ness. Here’s to hoping Dampier gets there sooner.

GO UTES!!!

I expect them to have a good year, but, like the last two years, it depends on injuries. People forget that we were doing just fine until Baylor got away with one of the latest hits I’ve ever seen.

Awful injury luck across the entire team has derailed our last two seasons.

We will be fine as long as that doesn’t happen again.

This coaching/conditioning staff needs to prove they can get a QB through the season uninjured. My biggest fear is we’ll have a strong early showing that is extinguished by a QB injury.

This year is the chance for Whittingham to declare emphatically that the last 36 months or so have been noise, purely an unfortunate series of consecutive and often coincident insults that have compounded to derail a formerly impressive program.

Given that he had every opportunity (over a period of several years) to have a backup quarterback (or even pick the correct backup quarterback in his stable), a lesson a head coach shouldn’t actually even have to learn. And given that our offensive woes seem to be a version of issues that we’ve had before, only more serious, I think our boosters and more sober fans can see the writing on the wall, it’s no real wonder our NIL effort is unimpressive. I would prefer to be hopeful, but it’s becoming pretty clear that we’ve lost the offseason as well. Add that to the pile. The more “unfortunate coincidences” and “bad breaks” that happen back to back to back to back the more it becomes difficult believe that the way our team is being run has nothing to do with it, I mean mathematically. And I think folks have a natural sense of that.

Yet I don’t blame anyone for having hope, an average season by our old legend would probably see us in contention for the conference championship. It’s impossible to say he can’t pull it off again, knowing he’s capable of even better. But I’ve seen this story play out 1000 times in sports and other fields. Once it leaves, it just tends to not come back. I’m hoping that he can prove that whatever is left is enough.