After suffering seven, what must have been gut-wrenching, losses in a row for head coach Kyle Whittingham his Utah team finally picked up a 28-14 win on the road at UCF—their fifth, one short of becoming bowl eligible. Not counting the Covid year you’d have to go all the way back to 2013 to find a year that the Utes didn’t make it to a bowl game. Eight losses in a season? That hasn’t happened since 1989. After averaging 36 and 39 points per game in the two years their starting QB Cam Rising was healthy, Utah’s offense dropped to 23.2 last year which Rising missed completely due to an injury he sustained in the Rose Bowl back in January of 2023 and 23.6 this year with Rising also out to injury after the first couple of games. But one thing that hasn’t changed for Utah, they still play great defense and in spite of all of their losses are only giving up less than 21 points per game, just below Georgia nationally and third in the Big-12 behind Iowa State and BYU.
In this one you can certainly credit the defense for the win who came up with three turnovers leading to 17 of their 28 points. They struck their first blow on UCF’s opening possession of the game when they sacked their starting QB Dylan Rizk and forced him to fumble which they recovered leading to 3-0 Utah lead on a Cole Becker 37 yard field goal six plays later. After three possessions for each team that resulted in six punts, the Utah defense would come up big again on a pick-six half-way through the 2nd Qtr to make it 10-0. The Knights would come back ten plays later to make it a 10-7 game on a 5 yard TD run by Senior RB RJ Harvey. Utah would score one more time before the break on a Trey Coleman 24 yard field goal to go up 13-7 at the half.
Neither team would be able to make any headway on their first two possessions of the 3rd Qtr but with under five minutes left Utah would go on a 9 play 49 yard drive that would take them all the way to the beginning of the 4th Qtr. Scoring just four seconds in on a 15 yard TD pass from Senior QB Luke Bottari to Landon King, the Utes would go up 21-7 after a successful 2-point conversion. After a Utah three-and-out and punt down to the UCF 10 yard line the Knights QB would throw up a pick six on their second play from scrimmage to fall behind 28-7 with just 3:34 left in the game. UCF would close it up to 28-14 on a 6 yard TD pass from Freshman backup QB EJ Colson to Senior RB RJ Harvey but it took all but the last 20 seconds of the game to unfold. It will be interesting to see where the Big-12 Media Poll–who had the Utes picked to be on top of the conference this year–places Utah next year after this season, the worst in Kyle Whittingham’s career. The next time we’ll see both UCLA and Utah is when they play each other on Saturday, August 30th of 2025 in the Rose Bowl.