Honestly, I can’t take too much offense at this
Yeah, a team that hoped to make the College Football Playoff (and was in line to do so until their last game) is disappointed about playing Utah in the Rose Bowl. I get that.
The most negative thing is saying that people don’t care about Utah. Which is harsh, but in comparison to the Ohio States, Oklahomas, Notre Dames, Alabamas, Michigans of the world, Utah just doesn’t have that sort of following – look at TV numbers if nothing else.
We had a solid year and got 11.92M viewers during the regular season this year (plus 4.25M in the conf champion game). Nothing to be ashamed of, it puts us 3rd in the PAC12 behind Oregon (30.86M) and UCLA (14.10M) and just ahead of Washington (11.82M). And if we include the conference championship, we’re up at 16.17, ahead of UCLA …but the Michigan/Ohio State game alone drew 15.89M viewers. As many unique viewers watched that game as likely watched Utah over the last 2 years or so.
We’re not (yet) at that level of interest/following. Utah has a very good team and is respected by people who know college football, but we don’t have the same sort of cachet as Ohio St. That’s just reality. If we want to develop it, it starts with winning this game, which is a great opportunity for us.
On the positive side, they do compare us to Michigan, a college football team that is in the playoff and universally considered one of the best in the country this year. They think there’s a potential that we could “out-bully them”.
They think Devin Lloyd will possibly be the first LB off the board, and that “if you thought Noah Sewell and Josh Ross and the Penn St guys were problems, wait until you see this guy”.
Also worth noting that I’d hate for our fanbase to be judged by the comments of 3 random yahoos claiming to represent all of us
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