Utes finish #16 in Final Poll!

[cjd1]

https://www.ncaa.com/rankings/football/fbs/associated-press

Not bad considering the finish of the season.

[Tony (admin)]

Ok.

[Guido]

And we will begin the 2020 campaign outside the top 25 again.  I am pretty sure I have heard this song before…

[dystopiamembrane]

I am surprised that some on this board are upset because a school from Salt Lake City does not have an elite college football program.

[Guido]

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.

[dystopiamembrane]

I agree completely with this assessment. That is our team.
I read your intial post differently, as if you were complaining about the situation you describe above.
Did not mean to seem as if I was saying you were “a bad fan,” rather voicing my opinion about those with high expectations that crash into negativity when those expectations do not come to fruition.
Many an apology for dialing it up. Go, Utes!

[Guido]

And my reply was hardly the epitome of calm either.  Sorry if *I* dialed it up too much as well.  Once upon a time I was passionate about my teams, but a combination of the Utes and the Jazz and the Twins and age has broken me of that.  When I see people on message boards calling each other out about the way they cheer for their teams, it makes me roll my eyes a bit now. 

(this is directed to everyone in general – not dystopia) Be passionate or passive – I don’t care.  Just don’t call out other fans when they don’t cheer the same way you do.  Just because I don’t scream at the TV after every turnover does not mean that I care less about it than you do.  I have just come to realize that, in the end, it makes no difference so I react differently.  That’s all.

[UteThunder]

Wow! I thought we would be lucky to finish inside the top 25. 

[PhiladelphiaUte]

Really?  Can you name even ONE P5 team who’d won 10 or more games who did NOT finish ranked in the Top-25?

[PhiladelphiaUte]

Really?  Can you name even ONE P5 team who’d won 10 or more games who did NOT finish ranked in the Top-25?

And WE’D won 11!

[UteThunder]

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.

[Swoop Doggy Dogg]

16-25 only has three teams from P5 conferences; Utah, Michigan, and Texas. 

 

[Charlie]

Post season games are different. Exactly half of all the countries very best teams lose. Top 15 teams loose half their games with other top 15 teams in general. One of the top 15 teams win 2 games. Not sure, but it seems more that half the CCG losers lose to another team that is still on a high. Often teams blasted in the postseason follow up with a great year, often top teams that lose a lot of starters follow up with a great year. Why not wait and see what happens.

[Author]

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