As the Misery Index counts down to the end of yet another season, it’s time to honor a team that doesn’t generate much publicity outside of the Mountain Time Zone. But if you were to stack up all this year’s disappointments from Florida State to Southern California, it would be professional malpractice to skip over the stunning collapse that has occurred this season in Salt Lake City.
Utah has not only been among the best programs in the Western half of the country over the last decade, it has been by far the most consistent. From 2014 to 2023, it finished in the Top 25 six times with no losing seasons and consecutive Rose Bowl appearances in 2021 and 2022.
The Utes’ move to the Big 12 was not supposed to change the narrative. They were favored to win the conference, and a 4-0 start to this season launched them into the top-10.
But since then? It’s been nothing but bad news, culminating with Saturday’s 49-24 loss to Colorado and a sixth consecutive defeat that puts Utah on the brink of missing a bowl game, which has only happened three times in Kyle Whittingham’s 19 seasons as head coach.
Saturday’s result was jarring. It’s only the third time Utah has lost to Colorado since they resumed their annual rivalry in 2011, and the talent disparity was alarming. Utah finished with just 272 offensive yards and turned the ball over four times, undercutting any hope of pulling an upset.
That pathetic effort comes on the heels of a season-defining moment for Utah just one week earlier when it blew a 21-10 halftime lead and lost to rival Brigham Young 22-21. That game turned on a defensive holding call against the Utes with 90 seconds to go that bailed the Cougars out of a bad fourth-and-10 play and ultimately a certain defeat. Given another chance, BYU marched down the field and kicked a game-winning, 44-yard field goal.
Mark Harlan, Utah’s athletics director, made the unusual decision to come into the press room and say that the game was ‘stolen from us,” adding, ‘We were excited about being in the Big 12, but tonight I am not.”
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We don’t like to tell people how to spend their money, but the $40,000 fine levied against Harlan was an Enron-level bad investment. Not only was the holding call correct — or at least correct enough that you can’t say Utah got robbed — it’s quite a price to pay when you consider where Utah sits right now at 1-6 in the Big 12 and completely off the radar in the larger context of the College Football Playoff. Even if you believe Big 12 refs got that one call wrong or cost Utah the game, it does not change the fundamental calculus of what a mess this season has been, including offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig’s resignation in October.
The main excuse for Utah’s problems, especially on offense, has been the absence of quarterback Cameron Rising, who suffered a hand injury in Week 2 and played just one game since before another season-ending injury.
But here’s the problem with that. Rising has been in college since 2018. A combination of injuries and the extra COVID year has allowed him to extend his eligibility beyond anything that would be considered normal. He’s 25 years old for goodness sakes. If your entire program hinges on a guy who should have been out of college football long before now under normal circumstances, you haven’t done a very good job of building your team.
Rising may have masked some problems if he could have stayed healthy, but he couldn’t have carried a load this heavy. Utah is just a bad football team, and the entire athletic department hasn’t handled it very well.
That’s why the Utes are No. 1 in the Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which fan bases are feeling the most angst.
Four more in Misery
LSU: The entire theory of Brian Kelly leaving Notre Dame for the Bayou three years ago was that he didn’t believe the Irish could win a national championship in this era of college football. ‘I loved my time at Notre Dame,” Kelly told the Associated Press in 2022. “We were on different paths and that’s fine.” What he meant was that after reaching the College Football Playoff a couple times only to get blown out by Clemson and Alabama, he felt like he’d maxed out at Notre Dame and wanted to see if he could reach the Holy Grail at a place without some of the stuffy restrictions around collegiate and academic life that Notre Dame clings to in this era of college football professionalization. Also, LSU is just a flat-out great job where its last three coaches had all won national championships – even Ed Orgeron.
It’s hard to screw up LSU. And yet, here we are.
In Kelly’s third season, he’s 6-4 after a 27-16 loss at Florida. There’s no way to spin this. It’s a stunning, resounding dud of a year. Meanwhile, Notre Dame is likely to cruise into the playoff under Marcus Freeman. Maybe life in South Bend wasn’t so bad after all.
But this isn’t about Notre Dame. It’s about Kelly being an awkward fit at LSU and not winning nearly enough, yet having no obvious exit ramp and more than $60 million guaranteed on his contract. They are seemingly stuck with each other long past the honeymoon phase, and the way LSU has collapsed over the last three games without showing much fight suggests the problems are deeper than X’s and O’s. Whether Kelly still has command of that locker room is now a front-and-center issue that will define whether LSU can find its way back to contention or is stuck with the sunk cost of a splashy coaching hire that looks more like a mistake every week.
Kansas State: Among the country’s college football tastemakers, a consensus formed this season around the idea that Kansas State was really the best team in the Big 12. This happened even though the evidence suggested otherwise, including a 29-point loss to BYU and a ghastly loss last week to a Houston team that is now 4-6. Still, the Kansas State believers pressed on, insisting that the Wildcats would somehow find their way into the Big 12 championship game and make the CFP, where they were supposed to be all along. Uh, no.
It’s hard to say how such a misguided narrative took hold so deeply in the minds of people who should have known better, but thank goodness nobody has to pretend anymore that Kansas State is anything better than the non-threatening Big 12 team that it is. Reality slapped the Wildcats in the form of a 24-14 loss at home to Arizona State, and their path to the Big 12 title game is all but blocked. In a vacuum, Kansas State could feel good about a 9-3 season if that’s how it ends up. But in this new era of the 12-team playoff, the disappointment at Kansas State will be about having the best team on paper in the conference and coming up woefully short of cashing in that opportunity.
Nebraska: This week marked the sideline debut of new Huskers offensive coordinator Dana Holgorsen, the former West Virginia and Houston head coach who strikes a remarkable resemblance these days to the late, great Jimmy Buffett. But Nebraska football is no Cheeseburger in Paradise at the moment. And the Changes in Attitude that Holgorsen was supposed to bring didn’t stop a fourth consecutive loss, 28-20 to Southern California, that truly imperils Nebraska’s bowl prospects. Unless the Huskers can beat either Wisconsin or Iowa, it will be a stunning eighth consecutive year without the postseason after starting this season 5-1. The sharks are starting to circle around head coach Matt Rhule — Fins to the left and right, you might say — which accounts for the desperate offensive coordinator change at this point in the season. But Come Monday, it’s the same old story at Nebraska. Rhule is 2-9 in one-score games, following in the footsteps of Scott Frost’s 5-22 mark that caused a Volcano of Big Red rage to blow all over his coaching career. The margins are as small as a Pencil Thin Mustache, but all losses count the same. In the state of Nebraska, that’s like Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season.
Charlotte: There has been a trend lately where schools like Charlotte with nothing to lose make non-traditional coaching hires and hope to strike gold. Biff Poggi fit the mold. Though his life story can’t be told in a paragraph, the gist of it is that he was pursuing two careers as a young man — one as a football coach, the other as a hedge fund manager. He made a ton of money but kept coaching high school football for nearly three decades, hooked on with Jim Harbaugh at Michigan a few years back as something akin to a consigliere, then got hired at Charlotte as a 63-year old with very little college coaching experience.
Poggi likes to stir the pot on social media, and his in-your-face personality isn’t for everyone. That would be tolerable if he were winning, but he’s not. Poggi is 6-16 as a head coach, and he was asked after a 59-24 loss to South Florida how he’d grade himself this season.
“Terrible,” he said. “It all starts with me, and it ends with me, and the entire organization looks like it looks because it’s the way I chose it to look. So all of the blame squarely needs to go on me and these are the kind of games that when you have as coach and your team is 3-6 things don’t end well. so I’m fully aware of that, but I’d say my grade has been not good.”
We appreciate the honesty here at the Misery Index, and we couldn’t say it any better than Poggi said it himself.
Miserable but not miserable enough
Missouri: Last week, a jubilant coach Eli Drinkwitz walked off the field after a wild win over Oklahoma and declared that it kept the Tigers in contention for a CFP bid. “That’s right, I said it – playoff hunt,” he told the SEC Network while looking straight into the camera. Drinkwitz, who so desperately wants to be this generation’s Steve Spurrier while possessing only a fraction of his wit, charm or trolling talent, might have been vindicated had the Tigers held on for another white-knuckle victory at South Carolina. But for teams like Missouri, the water usually finds its level. The Tigers were never really in the playoff hunt except as a spasm of Drinkwitz’s unyielding desire for attention, and thanks to South Carolina quarterback LaNorris Sellers we no longer need to do the mental gymnastics to wonder if he’s right. After Missouri’s Brady Cook threw a 37-yard touchdown on fourth-and-5 to take the lead with 1:10 left, Sellers marched South Carolina 70 yards down the field to one-up him with just 15 seconds to go for a 34-30 victory. It’s a pretty gutting way to lose for Missouri. On the other hand, given that the Tigers had gotten every break imaginable in razor-thin wins over the Sooners, Auburn and Vanderbilt, they probably had it coming.
Pittsburgh: When victory was in sight Saturday — and it would have been a massive victory against Clemson — all the Panthers needed was to do something they’d done successfully the entire game. But after giving up just eight net rushing yards and pretty much stoning Clemson at the line of scrimmage, Pitt somehow allowed quarterback Cade Klubnik to escape their grasp on the final drive and run for a 50-yard touchdown with 1:16 remaining. Clemson’s 24-20 victory keeps the Tigers in the hunt for the ACC title. And in an otherwise really good game for Pitt’s defense, one bad call against the quarterback draw did them in. But the bigger disappointment for Pitt fans is a season that started with visions of the CFP decomposing into ‘meh’ territory. After starting 7-0, the Panthers have lost three in a row including a horrible home loss last week to Virginia.
Arkansas: When Razorback fans are done with a coach, they don’t play by normal rules. They’ll get phone records and look for something mildly embarrassing (Houston Nutt). They’ll raise a ruckus over attending a Friday night high school football game to watch their son (Chad Morris). And now they’ll apparently buy billboards on the highway near Fayetteville: “Thank you for 5 great years Sam. A change is needed in order to compete in the SEC.” Tough gig, the Arkansas job. Sam Pittman is finding out, even though the Hogs should clinch bowl eligibility for the fourth time in Pittman’s five years next week against Louisiana Tech. Yes, the bad moments look bad — like a 20-10 loss to Texas in which the Razorbacks were held to 231 yards of offense with two turnovers. Is the overwhelmingly negative sentiment toward Pittman a slight overreaction? It’s not like the bottom has fallen out. On the other hand, Arkansas fans see traditional SEC also-rans like South Carolina and Ole Miss ascending — even Missouri was really good last year — and wonder, “Why not us?”
Tennessee: We can’t make too much of one game, given that the Vols still have a good chance to make the playoff. But if Georgia coach Kirby Smart owns Tennessee to such a degree, he should probably move into the governor’s mansion in Nashville just for fun. Not only has Georgia won eight in a row against the Vols, the combined score of those games is 303-104. A complete whitewash. It was no different this time in Georgia’s 31-17 win in Athens, putting the Bulldogs back in the playoff mix and SEC championship race. Though Tennessee has reversed its fortunes lately against Alabama, its other historical rival, the Georgia game remains as lopsided as a bug versus a windshield.
(This story was updated to change a video.)