In the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s lackluster 14-7 loss to Northwestern in the Las Vegas Bowl, a defeat that saw an already inconsistent offense fully relegated to the depths of mediocrity, the Utes searched for the right words to convey their feelings about what had just transpired.
How do you best juxtapose a horrific performance against the low-stakes expectations that preceded it?
How do you adequately contextualize one final brutal game within a season that, in a vacuum, didn’t live up to the hype, but was nevertheless a relative success given all the drama that surrounded it?
Head coach Kyle Whittingham went for the option of simply putting a hard barrier between the game and everything that preceded it.
“Just to get here with an 8-4 record is very commendable, now today is very forgettable,” he said. “We’ve got to bury this one and move on — no positive came out of this game tonight. At least I can’t see it right now.”
That seems a fair way to look at it.
Then again, the two players who addressed the media following Saturday’s interminable affair — running back Micah Bernard and linebacker Karene Reid — were asked how they would assess the season as a whole, and they still found snippets from that game to be representative of the bigger picture.
Naturally, both focused on the Utes’ never-say-die proclivities.
“We went into the locker room [at halftime] and were silent for a minute, but we were like, ‘Nah, we’re down seven points. It’s next man up,’” said Bernard, who returned from a three-month absence to score Utah’s lone touchdown. “It doesn’t matter who we got out there, we’re going to keep going.”
To his point, a Utes roster already decimated this season by injuries was further ravaged by transfer portal defections and NFL draft declarations.
Utah was seriously undermanned, and it showed, but there wasn’t anything those remaining could do about it besides go out there and try their best.
“If I could have looked at our roster [as it stands now] at the beginning of the season and then predict our record, I wouldn’t think we would have won eight games,” said Reid. “So it says a lot about the grit and the culture that came from the coaches, goes down to the leaders, and to the rest of the team. It doesn’t matter if we’re down 20 players, the culture is the culture here.”
No one denies there is grit and culture within the program.
But talent and execution were sorely lacking against the Wildcats.
Whittingham tried to take the blame for the latter, at least.
“It’s not the players’ fault at all,” he said. “We as coaches have got to have them better prepared and give them a better chance to win.”
Bernard, meanwhile, countered that the outcome was less about the staff’s schemes than about the athletes’ performance.
“The plays are the plays, but it’s the players who make the plays,” he said. “We’ve gotta make the plays, and we didn’t do that.”
Let’s just agree that, short-handed as the Utes were coming into the game, there weren’t many who actually played in it who came away pleased with anything that transpired.
The Las Vegas Bowl proved to be an awful conclusion to a trying season.
And if Whittingham couldn’t find any positive takeaways from the game itself, the same certainly could not be said for the season as a whole.
“I told the guys in the locker room they have a lot to be proud of. We found a way to win eight games this year in a very competitive Pac-12 Conference, with two other Power-5 schools on the schedule in Florida and Baylor. And so, in a way it’s remarkable what we did,” Whittingham said. “… [This end result] is not what any of us had in mind as we were going through the offseason last year and preparing. We thought a three-peat was very realistic, and it didn’t turn out to be.”
They’ll bury it in the Pac-12 graveyard.
And they’ll move on and prepare for the brighter possibilities on their Big 12 horizon.
