Utes finish #16 in Final Poll!

Dial it down a bit there dystopia.  Tell me where we are wrong.  Tell me that we have not seen some version of this show over and over.  We start the season just outside the top 25 with a “solid but missing a few pieces” team.  We win a few games.  National pundits say “maybe they are for real.”  We creep our way up the rankings.  Then we have a wtf loss, get knocked down a few pegs, win a few more games, work our way back up the rankings.  Then comes the wake up game leaving us in the low teens / high twenties.  We get a less-than-great bowl game and finish the season right around number 20.  Yes, there has been the outlier season, but if I had to put $100 down on the outcome of a Utah season, this is what I would bet on.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not upset.  I understand that we have a good team.  A solid team.  There are plenty of programs across the country who would love to win more games than they lose just like Utah.  That said, I will still tune in or get to the stadium and cheer regardless of our record.  The Utes are my team whether we become an elite program or whether 20 years from now we are still stuck in this Groundhog Day. 

If my acceptance of Utah’s “better-than-average-but-not-as-good-as-the-blue-blood-teams” makes me a bad fan in your eyes, this 50 year old is cool with that.  Your perception of my fandom, however, does nothing to alter my expectations of the Utes.  It is best for my mental health to expect one loss for every 2 games we win, and I will be pleasantly surprised when we have a season like this one where we exceed that number of wins, and mildly disappointed when we fail to achieve 8 wins.  My life goes on one way or the other.

Maybe I just haven’t fully adjusted to the mindset that we are P5 and will therefore be rated higher in the poles more often than not. But considering we lost to 3 of the 4 best teams we played including getting completely blasted by two of them in our final two games, I thought the voters would drop us completely out.