There is a football ranking system run by a U Memphis math professor named DP Dwiggins who puts Utah at #7. His site is called DPDsdogs.com
http://dpdsdogs.com/ncaa/fbsrank.htm
His methodology is here:
http://dpdsdogs.com/ncaa/rankexp.htm
One thing I note about his method is that there are 2 factors and each has a time-based weighting, so it is weighting recent performance high and more distant results less. Since 2 of 3 of the Utes’ losses were early in the season, that probably helps a lot. Jeff Sagarin has a separate scoring/ranking for “Recent Performance”. Utes look good there, too. Sagarin has Utes #10 in his “Overall” rankings and #7 in the Recent Performance.
Utah @ 
Baylor 
.
