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SALT LAKE CITY — In football, it’s easy to pick apart a game and point to a multitude of factors as to why a team is doing well or struggling to win games.
In Utah’s case, a shift in mindset is all it took to open up conference play after back-to-back losses. The Utes became a new team, of sorts, and handily beat Stanford and Arizona to right the course, scoring 40+ points in both games and shifting the tide back into their favor in the race for a South Division title.
Senior linebacker Cody Barton said the change reminds him of when former Utah running back Joe Williams retired from the game in 2016 after a slow start and after injuries plagued his game. With a couple weeks off, Williams re-joined the team and attacked the game with a new sense of vigor and physicality never seen before.
The performance earned him a spot on an NFL team and an opportunity to continue his love of playing football.
“It was all just mentality. It's just a mindset, you know?” Barton said. “We were losing. I'm not saying the mindset was bad, but I'm saying we've got to find something to spark something, to spark something to get us some wins. That's kind of compared to that whole new mentality of just, you gotta believe in yourself, believe in this whole team. We're winners.”
With a renewed purpose, Utah hosts South Division rival USC Saturday in a likely showdown for an opportunity to represent the South in the Pac-12 Championship game. It’s a familiar position for Utah, who has failed to win key South games before to claim a division title. But with the Utah team surging, now may be the best chance the program has to finally meet its goal.
Barton said the team is happy they control their own destiny, and that USC is the first step to claiming the South. But he recognized that Saturday’s matchup has to be different than in years past, where Utah has fallen short.
“We've been in these shoes before and we've come up short in the past,” he said. “We have that taste in our mouth of losing — that two-game losing streak we had. And so that's something that we don't want to feel again.”
“How things sit right now, for us, it's fortunate because we control our own destiny,” head coach Kyle Whittingham said. “If we take care of our business, which there's a ton of football left — it's too early to talk about the rest of the season — but we don't need any help. We just need to be able to focus on us and try to keep plugging away week by week starting this week with SC.”
In Utah’s favor, though, is an all-time efficient defense, a surging offense and an always ready and reliable special teams unit to combat the star power of the Trojans’ roster. Utah’s defense, specifically, has been special this season and is ranked in the top 10 nationally in many categories.
Most notably, the defense is second in the nation in rushing defense, allowing only 74.8 yards per game. In red zone defense, they hold teams to 56.25 percent scoring in the red zone, and they are 10th in scoring defense and ninth in total defense by holding teams to 300.0 yards per game.
The one area where Utah seemingly lacks is its passing defense, where the secondary is giving up an average of 225.2 yards per game and is ranked 68th in the country. But despite the high average yardage in the passing game, the secondary is 18th in the country and first in the Pac-12 in pass efficiency defense, with a pass efficiency rating of 108.2.
Basically, the secondary allows for some big plays in the passing game, but teams aren’t able to capitalize on the yards when it matters most.
Rating the effectiveness of his secondary, Whittingham said the unit has been “pretty darn good.” He added that the pass efficiency defense metric is the program’s “barometer of how we’re doing versus the pass.”
“We've given up some yards in certain weeks, but like I said, you judge it by the efficiency of it all,” he said. “And we're doing a good job.”
But Whittingham recognizes the tall task facing the Utes this week, particularly in the passing game. Because Utah has essentially taken away the run game from teams, he expects the Trojans to attack the defense in the air “a bunch.” In fact, Whittingham believes how his team does on pass defense will be the keep matchup of the game.
“To me, that’ll be, for the defense anyway, the biggest factor in the game: whether or not we can make those plays in the back end. That’ll be a great challenge for our secondary. We feel pretty good about our secondary.”
Kickoff is slated for just after 6 p.m. Saturday at Rice-Eccles Stadium. The game will be broadcast on the Pac-12 Networks and on ESPN 700.
