Remember those old television commercials for a camera company featuring Andre Agassi in which he dipped his sunglasses down and oh-so-cooly declared, “Image is everything”?
It is said that ad campaign haunted the tennis great for years, and while some criticized it for promoting style over substance — which was big at the time — it also prompted a divisive philosophical discussion among the thoughtful or perhaps it was among the really, really bored, some believing there were at least a few drops of veracity in the proclamation, some saying, “No, no … image is nothing.”
Well. If the former is partially true, if image reflects style and substance, if it represents not just what’s on the surface, but what’s going on two or three layers down, that’s both good news for and says something important about Utah football. Something important and something hard-earned.
In the comprehensive, Kyle Whittingham’s program has an image, all right, a reputation of being a buzzard-tough outfit, an annual collection of dudes you could see working on an oil rig or melting down steel over at the plant or mining for coal 2,000 feet down or fishing for the latest catch on a distressed boat in the Bering Sea or maybe even teaching fourth-graders at a local elementary school. Guys who get a messy job done regardless of the degree of difficulty. They play football the way Bo Schembechler would have wanted it played — with a socket wrench in one hand and a crankshaft in the other, all governed by unusual grit.
Whittingham gets credit for setting the tone for all of that.
But there’s more — necessary stuff, like talent, skill and speed.
That’s the rep. It’s been like that for years, but on a national scale it went throttle up in more recent seasons, beyond vague memories of the Fiesta Bowl at the conclusion of the 2004 run and the Sugar Bowl after 2008. Can you believe those wins were some 20 and 16 years ago now? Whoa. Making an almost yearly trip to Pac-12 championship games, even without wins in the Rose Bowl or any other bowl over the Utes’ past five postseason appearances, including two losses to Northwestern, one to Texas, one to Ohio State and one to Penn State, hasn’t diminished the way Utah football is thought of, not among many fans, many national football observers.
Evidence of that is seen in the predictions for the Utes as they enter the Big 12. It’s not often that a newcomer to a strong league is projected to win the thing in that inaugural year. There’s a lot to get used to — opponents never faced before, venues never visited before, crowds never heard before, travel routes never traversed before, coaches never strategized against before, and more. It’s like an amateur golfer playing a course for the first time, not knowing precisely where the dastardly unseen bends in the fairways and greens are. But no matter, that’s exactly where a lot of preseason guesses are going right now — forecasting that Utah will reign over the newly expanded conference in Year One.
The Utes are highly ranked in most early polls, some prognosticators placing them in the Top 10, many having them qualifying for the new 12-team playoff.
Joel Klatt of Fox Sports not only has Utah “most likely” winning the league — “They’re the best team in the Big 12,” he says — and getting a top-four seed and a bye in the playoff, he also says that Salt Lake City “is immediately the toughest place to play in the Big 12.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Utes head coach Kyle Whittingham watches the game against the Colorado Buffaloes at Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City on Saturday, Nov. 25, 2023.
You can hear the objections in places like Stillwater and Manhattan and maybe Provo, too. But Klatt is backed by some statistical formulas — granted, they are inexact — that rate Rice-Eccles Stadium, where the Utes are 18-1 over the past three seasons, near the summit of difficult road stops in all of college football. It’s a tribute to the team and to its fans.
Either way, that’s the perception, and while widely-held views sometimes are wildly off target, in this case, Utah’s reputation is an accurate reflection of the remarkable progress the program has made. Longtime Ute fans can remember the days when games were lost before they were even played, when Utah might rise up on occasion to snag a win, but when more often it was scheduled by out-of-conference teams as an easy victory for them and a money game for the Utes.
Not anymore.
Any team looking for easy now wouldn’t schedule Utah and most certainly would only come to Rice-Eccles if it were seeking a bloody nose and broken kneecaps. Big 12 opponents will have no choice in the matter, come they must.
So, wherever you land on the sliding scale of philosophical debate over image being everything or image being nothing at all, you’ve got to admit, competitively speaking, owning one that puts bits of doubt in opponents and stirs just the right amount of confidence in a football team is useful. Better to be respected or feared than to be discounted or laughed at.
Almost nobody in the Big 12 is discounting or laughing at Utah as it heads into its virgin season there, and voices around the country seem to agree that only the foolish would do so.
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