When Kyle Whittingham crossed the field at game’s end — pleased with a 28-14 Utah road victory — to shake Gus Malzahn’s hand, he chatted with the UCF coach for a few seconds and then broke into a wide, bright grin.
Why wouldn’t he?
Well. You know why.
Grimaces have been much more common around Utah football than grins. The Utes’ season was — note the past tense, with no postseason games qualified for — far less than what it seemed, even with the burps and hiccups, against the Knights.
After a 4-0 start, the Utes caromed through a stretch of misery, suffering through seven straight losses, most of them tight defeats, limping through injuries, searching for a quarterback before and after Cam Rising got hurt, battling through the departure of a veteran offensive coordinator and the evaporation of any hint of explosiveness on attack, and blowing through guesses and rumors that their longtime head coach, the rock of the program, was all set to leave football behind for the beauties of good senior living.
Hmm. While there was a sense of sentimentality hovering over Utah on Friday night, a kind of group wondering whether head-coach-in-waiting Morgan Scalley was, in the Utes’ worn-out vernacular, the next man up, nearly everything else seemed celebratory.
The Utes dominated — in a limited sort of way.
The defense was formidable and opportunistic, yielding yardage but capitalizing on three turnovers, scoring two decisive touchdowns, and limiting the Knights to just two scores, one of them coming near the end when the game was no longer in question. The lousy news: The offense remained skittish, certainly nothing to shout about, but good enough not to pay much notice to the fact that UCF out-gained the Utes 379 yards to 196.
The highlights centered on a 60-yard pick-6 by Zemaiah Vaughn and Smith Snowden’s 13-yard interception and sprint into the end zone, boosting the Utah fourth-quarter advantage to 28-7 and making that Ute resistance look familiar again, almost as dynamic as it had been in years gone by.
As mentioned, it’d be overcooking things to say Utah’s offense was lively, considering the attack picked up just 11 first downs, but fifth-string quarterback Luke Bottari actually threw a 15-yard touchdown pass to Landen King and followed that with a two-point conversion pass to Micah Bernard en route to 111 passing yards. If that sounds sarcastic and condescending, it is. But that type of showing is all the more acceptable when it comes inside a win. Shazam. The Utes even kicked a couple of field goals.
Look, at the end of a seven-game skid, anything on the plus side for the Utes seemed like manna from heaven, like something important might be in the offing. They’d take it because, to them, as insignificant as it might be to outsiders, a 5-7 mark felt much better than 4-8, even if only two of those victories came in Big 12 games.
And so, Utah’s 2024 season was punctuated with a win and a Whittingham smile.
The questions emanating from that glad expression were these: Did it punctuate something bigger than a single triumph? Something bigger than a woeful season? Did it place an exclamation point on a great coaching career?
Whittingham said he’d let everyone know as soon as he knows. This much everyone, including the coach himself, does know: For all he’s done, he didn’t have to cross the field for the last time with a win to be a winner. And maybe, deep down, that’s what that wide, bright grin was all about.
