- Utah football aims to rebound from a 34-10 loss to Texas Tech.
- Coach Whittingham emphasizes team resilience and leadership to overcome adversity.
- Players view the upcoming West Virginia game as crucial for season momentum.
SALT LAKE CITY — The fun and games are over.
The usual smiles that littered the faces of Utah football players each week with a 3-0 start to the season were transformed Monday into a more serious, reflective look. A weekend loss to Texas Tech will have than affect on a team.
But for a team that believed it had what it took to compete for a Big 12 championship, those feelings took a significant hit over the weekend after a poor offensive performance that amounted to just 263 total yards on offense.
(It wasn't just a poor Utah performance but a strong effort by a Texas Tech team who has taken a significant step toward being the top team in the Big 12.)
Sure, Utah made it a 3-point game with 10 minutes left to play, but the final scoreboard read 34-10 — a blowout on their own field where the fans did their absolute best to get the home team a win well before a 10 a.m. kick.
All the good feelings about the season changed in that moment — at least for the 24 hours the team had to wallow in the loss.
It's time to move on.
Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham said he believes the current makeup of his team will prevent a sudden fall into obscurity, where one loss turns into two and things spiral from there. This team — for many reasons — is not akin to the 2024 team who went 5-7, he intimated.
"Very confident that this team is not gonna allow that to happen," Whittingham said. "Their attitude, their competitiveness — now, last year's team was competitive too, and had a great attitude — but we've got a lot of things going for us. We just had an off day offensively. And, again, Texas Tech had a great deal to do with that."
He added the team has "really good leadership" and it now has to "be able to handle it and bounce back."
"We'll be back," he said.
The players have moved on, and the focus is now on beating West Virginia on their home field in a game that will, once again, be played on FOX in a prime viewing window. It's a chance to show the nation that the previous game was an aberration to what many still believe can be a special season.
It's a time where Utah can show how it answers — or not — when adversity hits; a time to use the Texas Tech loss as motivation to be even better.
"We try to stay up as much as possible," quarterback Devon Dampier said. "But, I mean, when that happens, you definitely use it as a learning curve. And I think it's brought that fire in us again — not saying we didn't have it, but just adds more fuel to that fire. And I think we're gonna come out the way we should be."
"I feel like we're just — it is a brotherhood," added offensive tackle Spencer Fano. "Like, we take this loss, and that was a hard loss to take, but I feel like, especially in this last week, no one's throwing the towel in or anything like that. We all have the same goals, and we're working to achieve those."
It wouldn't be the first time Utah has faced adversity over the years and finished strong, with the 2021 season as the most notable in recent history. The Utes started the season 1-2, with losses to BYU and San Diego State, before losing only one of their next 10 games, including the program's first Pac-12 championship.
Yes, Cam Rising was named the full-time starter after the San Diego State loss, but Utah still laid an egg on the road at Oregon State a few weeks later. From then on, it was a "wake-up call" that the team needed to be better. And it was.
In 2019, Utah started off the season in a similar position to this season with a 3-0 record to closeout nonconference play before a Week 4 test against USC on the road in the LA Memorial Coliseum. The Utes lost the game against the Trojans but then reeled off eight straight wins en route to a Pac-12 championship appearance.
Conversely, in 2024, as injuries and offensive struggles mounted, Utah went the other way and didn't win another game until the last game of the season against UCF. Losses started to snowball and it got tougher to find wins — even though most losses were one-possession games.
For the current roster of Utah players, the West Virginia matchup is a proving game, a potential inflection point to the season. Beat West Virginia on the road and the morale and vision remains clear — especially as the team goes into a bye week — but lose and there's potentially more problems ahead.
And with West Virginia in dire straits based on the number of starters injured, there's no better time than Saturday to answer the adversity call.
"Yeah, it's really big," Fano said. "We need this."
