BYU Football: Scouting the Schedule – Utah
By Shaun Gordon
Lawless Republic’s Scouting the Schedule series continues with BYU Football’s final game of the 2018 season: the Holy War.
If there’s one thing that haunts the nightmares of BYU Football fans, it’s the streak.
The Cougars have lost seven straight games to Utah.
BYU hasn’t won this decade.
This isn’t BYU’s longest losing streak to Utah, though. That sad time ran between 1929 and 1937, when the Cougars lost nine in a row. If you add in ties, BYU went 20 consecutive games without winning.
On the flip side, the Cougars’ longest winning streak is also nine games, from 1979 to 1987.
Even though this streak hasn’t reached historical proportions quite yet, it’s getting close, and it’s frustrating for BYU fans.
Is this the year that the Cougars finally beat the Utes for the first time in nearly 10 years?
Last Season
Last season seemed like deja vu for Utah, as they did what they do more often than not. They started off the season with four straight wins, followed by four straight losses. Of the four losses, two were close contests against Stanford and USC, and the other two were blowouts against Oregon and Arizona State.
After winning easily at home against UCLA, the Utes were edged in Rice Eccles Stadium by Mike Leach and Washington State. A razor-thin loss to Washington set up a must-win final game against Colorado for bowl eligibility.
That one wasn’t particularly close, and Utah earned a trip to the Heart of Dallas Bowl, where they took down West Virginia to finish the year with a 7-6 record.
Offseason
The key parts of the coaching staff stay the same, and somewhat miraculously the Utes have the same offensive coordinator for two straight seasons in Troy Taylor.
The biggest loss in graduation was wideout Darren Carrington III, who was easily Utah’s best receiver last season. With seven defensive players also graduated, this is a season that will test whether the Utes have created enough depth to have a successful “next man up” formula.