- Utah football plays Wyoming on Saturday due to a 2017 home-and-home agreement.
- The game was postponed from 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic's impact.
- Utah's nonconference strategy evolved to include tougher opponents under new leadership.
SALT LAKE CITY — A University of Utah scheduling quirk is finally ready to start moving off the books this week.
The Utes, who are ranked No. 20 by the Associated Press this week, will play their final nonconference game this Saturday at Wyoming.
If that looks weird, a well-established Power Four program playing a true road game against a Mountain West team, let alone at one of the conference's notoriously difficult venues, well, it is.
There's a backstory.
Upon joining the Pac-12 in 2010, then-athletic director Chris Hill and other key decision-makers, including head coach Kyle Whittingham, tried to decide what a typical three-game, nonconference schedule should look like.
In the early Pac-12 days, as Utah tried to catch up in terms of roster talent and facilities, diving head-first into nonconference competition wasn't going to happen.
"We thought we would have a team we could beat 100% of the time, a Group of Five we could beat three-quarters of the time, and then take a Power Five team and hopefully split with them off and on," Hill told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2021, before the Utes played a memorable true road game at San Diego State. "I thought, let's find someone we were familiar with, someone we played before. BYU, a lot of people didn't, but we always considered them a Group of Five because they're always very tough for us to play against.
"We thought we better ease our way in given our knowledge of what was there."
For context, BYU was an FBS independent from 2011-22 before joining the Big 12 ahead of the 2023 academic year.
"It's about leverage, and at that time, we didn't have any," Hill said. "We didn't have the juice that someone like Texas, someone major like that has so that a two-for-one can get done. We tried. We couldn't find it."
In April 2017, Utah and Wyoming agreed to a straight home-and-home series. The original game contract called for the Cowboys to host the Utes on Sept. 19, 2020, with the return game on Sept. 6, 2025, at Rice-Eccles Stadium.
Once the COVID-19 pandemic forced the Pac-12 in July 2020 to cancel nonconference football games, it meant the Utah-Wyoming series had to move. (After this Saturday's meeting in Laramie, Utah will host Wyoming early in 2027 on a date that is officially TBD.)
In 2015, with Utah a little more established at the then-Power Five level and headed toward Pac-12 contention, Hill began beefing up the early slate.
He agreed to home-and-home series with Baylor in 2023 and 2024, and Houston in 2026 and 2027 — although the two games against the Cougars will now be Big 12 matchups.
Once Hill retired and Mark Harlan took over as athletic director in 2018, he continued upping the nonconference schedule.
Under Harlan's watch, Utah has completed a home-and-home series with Florida (2022, 2023), and has home-and-home series on the books vs. Arkansas (2026, 2029), LSU (2031, 2032), and Wisconsin (2028, 2033).
Additionally, Utah has agreed to open the 2027 season against Miami in the Vegas Kickoff Classic at Allegiant Stadium.
