Will Utah's trip to Baylor be representative of what life will be like in the Big 12?

SALT LAKE CITY — Scheduling in college football is odd in the sense that games are often scheduled so far in advance that trying to project what a matchup might look like once it finally arrives is nearly impossible.

Take the University of Utah's trip to Waco, Texas, to face Baylor Saturday morning as a prime example.

When the two-game series between the schools was announced on April 29, 2015, the Utes were a budding Pac-12 contender but had not yet broken through to a Pac-12 championship game, let alone win one. At the time, the Bears were coming off consecutive Big 12 championships, had been to consecutive New Year's Six bowl games, and would register a third consecutive 10-win season that fall.

Speed ahead to last month. The latest seismic shift in college athletics, thanks to conference realignment, left Utah as a member of the Big 12 beginning in 2024-25, at which time it will share a conference with the team it is playing Saturday.

With Utah-Baylor set to be a conference game beyond this weekend, might Saturday's nonconference affair be representative of what life will be like for the Utes in the Big 12?

"It hasn't even entered into my thought process and hopefully not for the guys, too," Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham said Monday morning during his normal weekly press conference. "It is just another game that we have to get ready for. Nothing really outside of that besides getting ready for the Baylor Bears."

Added defensive coordinator Morgan Scalley: "You never know. With the transfer portal, teams can change. A third of your team may change year over year. I highly doubt that coaching staff is going to change with the job that (head coach) Dave Aranda has done, so I think you'll see a lot of similarities when we're in the same conference. I just haven't studied Big 12 ball enough yet to really say what I think. You look at the Big 12, a lot of teams like to throw the ball, but you look at TCU, you look at some of those teams, they run the heck out of it. I just don't know."

Whittingham having essentially nothing to say about the Big 12 Monday falls in line with the small handful of other instances the topic has been brought up to him since the move became official Aug. 4. His public stance will remain on the task at hand, as will that of offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig, who balked last month when asked whether or not Saturday's game may paint a picture of Utah's future.

Whittingham, Ludwig and Scalley, Utah's three most visible football coaches, may be zeroing in on preparing for a game, but other important people around Utah's athletic department will surely be focusing on not just Saturday's result but the bigger picture that the weekend's result may produce.

Utes athletic director Mark Harlan, of course, has a vested interest beyond just Saturday. So, too, does Harlan's deputy AD, Charmelle Green, who has been tasked by Harlan to lead a transition team to dive into any and all issues across all sports in an effort to have the athletic department ready to be competitive immediately when it enters the Big 12.

Scalley's point about the transfer portal and annual roster turnover notwithstanding, on paper, there is reason to believe Utah can contend in football in the Big 12 immediately in 2024. A trip to Baylor Saturday, which was agreed to eight-and-a-half years ago, may be coming at just the right time. It could either prove that notion about immediate contention correct, or maybe give a look at what Utah has to do to get there.

"I actually think Utah, stylistically, is going to fit into where this conference is going," CBS Sports national college football writer Shehan Jeyarajah said Wednesday on The Utah Checkdown podcast. "Baylor is a very physical team, BYU coming in is, obviously, a very physical team, Kansas State, Iowa State, this is becoming a very physical league.

"I think this is going to be a great opportunity for Utah to show the Big 12 what they're going to be about, and I think it's going to be a great opportunity for Utah to come here, to the heat of Texas, the heat of Waco, and experience it for the first time in a little while."

For what it's worth, the back end of the Utah-Baylor home-and-home is slated for Sept. 14, 2024, at Rice-Eccles Stadium, but there is no guarantee at the moment it will be a conference game.

Harlan said as much during a recent radio interview on KSL Unrivaled.

"There are things that are a little more in front of us like football scheduling that you have to literally start tackling now," Harlan said. "We are in a unique situation where we have two Big 12 teams on our schedule next year with Baylor and BYU. We have to find solutions there because they both are league games. However, we are looking at Baylor possibly being a non-conference game because of where we are in the calendar. It is darn near impossible to find two opponents that quickly."

Thanks to the Big 12 move, Utah is in a position where it has nine new openings on future nonconference schedules: Baylor, 2024; BYU, 2024-28, 2030; Houston, 2026-27.

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