The echoes of the past. The promises of the future.
Both will be caroming off the stadium seats and walls at Rice-Eccles Stadium on Thursday night as Utah takes the field against Florida in the 2023 football season opener. Those bygone sounds are both recent and ancient, originating from last year’s opening game, which the Utes lost to the Gators, and from nearly a couple of decades ago now, when Urban Meyer bolted out of Utah for Gainesville, a move, the aftermath of that move, freshened by the Netflix documentary series “Swamp Kings.”
Meyer’s effects remain at each of these programs in one way or another, despite the fact that he’s long been gone, having subsequently taken his churlish act, the good and the bad of it, to Ohio State, then to the Jacksonville Jaguars, then to the broadcast studio, where the positives and the negatives became/remain someone else’s concern.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah quarterback Cam Rising speaks with the media following practice on Monday Aug. 28, 2023, ahead of the season opener against Florida this week.
No need to revisit specific details of the boost he gave the Utes and the Gators, or to give him too much credit or blame for what’s happened since. That can be assigned to others, foremost among them the man who took over at Utah after Meyer bailed, the coach who has guided the Utes to a rocksteady place of national respect.
Last season’s loss to Florida, when the Utes were ranked seventh in the preseason national polls, bothered Kyle Whittingham, as every defeat does, as it was a game the Utes could have won. They led for much of the deal, but gave up 15 fourth-quarter points and an uncharacteristic 283 rushing yards, hurt by quarterback Anthony Richardson’s three touchdowns on the ground and his timely passing.
The Utes were on the verge of beating Florida, trailing by three points as quarterback Cam Rising led a nearly 70-yard drive for a triumphant touchdown, a score that never happened. Instead, he was picked off in the end zone to slam the door on a possible/probable Ute victory.
Well. All of the above are just echoes now. Richardson is gone to the NFL and Rising is dealing with a hurt-and-healing ACL, damage suffered in the Rose Bowl that optimists had hoped would be whole by now. If his activity rate in fall camp is any indicator, apparently, it is not whole, or at least might not be.
Replacing those echoes are the aforementioned promises for what nobody knows at this juncture — what will happen this time around. Whittingham has said this iteration of the Utes is the most talented collection he’s ever had, which is saying something notable. Putting that to the test against an SEC opponent like Florida right from the jump is the beauty and benefit of not doing what so many teams do — commencing the season with an automatic win against a vastly inferior opponent.
Games like that against teams like that reveal little and prove nothing, other than that a superior team in question can basically take the field without stumbling all over itself. They might be convenient warmups, silly celebrations, but as for shedding light on and telling a story about a team’s authenticity, they are a waste of time and space.
That is not what this is.
Florida is doing what it almost never does — traveling to the house of a quality non-league opponent to kick off a season. No home field guarantees anything, but it does give a boost to the Utes, who are favored to beat the Gators, but that line has been shrinking as opening night approaches. Not sure if that suggests anything substantial about who will play in this game and who won’t, who will perform at a peak level and who won’t. Maybe it’s just money leaning away from Utah and toward Florida or perhaps it’s just the vagaries of betting on college football.
Either way, as the echoes swirl and the promises stir, answers will arrive without delay on Thursday night. Few of them will be definitive, considering Utah’s penchant for thriving while bouncing back from early-season defeat, if that were to be the case here.
There is one other element to this matchup, again not a definitive one, but one worth considering, at least enough to have it fly across the big screen in your brain. Even as the Utes defend their back-to-back Pac-12 titles, and as they prepare to enter the Big 12, there’s this inkling, maybe just an imaginary notion blowing in the wind, that Utah is attempting to ready itself for whatever the shifting college football landscape will look like not this year, not next year, not the year after that, but in the not-so-distant future.
The Utes want to be seen as a valued player on a high level, so that whatever form the landscape takes, whatever super-conferences are shaped like, however they are configured, that Utah, with its performances on the field and the growing population in its market, will be properly positioned to be securely included.
Beating an SEC team on national television doesn’t hurt that intention.
Pondering such stuff, attaching it to a regular-old regular-season game on Aug. 31, 2023, might signal a wee bit of paranoia. But who could blame Utah for feeling some of that in the wake of what’s gone on in recent weeks, where the Utes lost a league home (Pac-12) they said they treasured and gained a league home (Big 12) they dragged their feet to link up with. Do they not-so-secretly crave to jump again, next time to the SEC or the Big Ten or some version of them?
That’s a question that can be answered quietly with a … no-duh. Who wouldn’t?
But it’s also far from Utah’s main focus at present, in the opener.
Those wild-eyed potential promises of the future can wait. The only future Whittingham cares about is now.
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