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SALT LAKE CITY — As Utah sat on the figurative sideline during its second bye week of the season, chaos unfolded as two top five programs in the College Football Playoff rankings lost over the weekend. Other teams surrounding No. 8 Utah narrowly escaped defeat as November reared its unwieldy head.
The shakeup, which won’t be fully realized until Tuesday night when the selection committee releases its latest rankings, gives Utah a seemingly clearer path to being one of four programs that could claim one of the coveted playoff spots. And though the positioning is great for Utah with just over four weeks to go before the final rankings of the season, the talk is cheap to Utah’s starting quarterback.
“I'm saying none of the rankings matter if we don't win,” Tyler Huntley said, as if irritated that Utah’s final three games of the season are being overlooked because of some playoff talk. “So there's no reason to really, like, pay attention to them, because what's that gonna do for us. We can't talk our way into no playoffs or nothin'. We gotta go out and win, so there ya go.”
For Huntley, there’s nothing really to say until his team has taken care of business on the field and won its remaining games. Not until the final whistle is blown against Colorado in the season finale; not until there’s a winning score for Utah at the end of a Pac-12 Championship matchup against Oregon.
Until then, the rankings don’t matter. Unless Utah can win out, there’s little reason to be distracted with a seemingly fictitious postseason destination for the team’s captain.
Still, each Tuesday provides intrigue to a Utah program that’s never been in the College Football Playoff discussion before. Sure, Utah has been included in the College Football Playoffs before — there’s only been five teams over the course of the six years that have been ranked more than the Utes in the rankings — but 2019 is different.
Traditionally, November has brought a lot of misery to Utah over its eight previous seasons in the Pac-12 — the Utes are 16-16 in that time. But in Utah’s last three games of the regular season this year, they’re favored by no less than 88%, according to ESPN’s Football Power Index, which is why playoff talk is creeping into the weekly vernacular.
“Our only focus on task is to get a win this week, and no matter what you're ranked, no matter what all that outside noise says or all the peripheral stuff, we can't worry about that because no matter what it says, you've got to win,” head coach Kyle Whittingham said. “And that's our whole focus and that's really not a big challenge in my estimation. I hope it's not a big challenge for our players; it shouldn't be.”
Looking at the Top 10 in the @AP_Top25, here's a look at each team's resume based on SP+. This removes FCS opponents. pic.twitter.com/dAZdCwPaun
— Josh Furlong (@JFurKSL) November 11, 2019
The players are aware of it — there’s really no escaping it — but their focus remains on each week’s game.
“I mean, I look at it, but I kind of think back to what our coaches tell us: it really, truly doesn't mean anything because the College Football Playoff ranking, it's great to be ranked in the top 10, but at the end of the day they only choose four teams, so it really doesn't matter being number eight,” cornerback Josh Nurse said. “So that's kind of the mindset.
“I look at it. I look at it to take into account. I think it's great to acknowledge your achievements and stuff while you're along the way but not to get too sucked up into it to where it's all you think about.”
Nurse said the team does “a good job policing each other and making sure everybody’s got their head on straight.” There’s no deviating from the team goals or allowing one another to get too excited about what the future could hold. They can’t; they’ve seen what that type of thinking can get them when they overlook the weekly grind that goes into focusing in on the opponent in front of them.
Utah’s loss to USC in Week 4 was a great learning experience.
“I feel like that game kind of showed us you can't take a play off, you can't overlook anyone, you really can't slack if you really want to accomplish those big dreams,” Nurse said. “You have to lock in every single day, you have to really go out there and play, you’ve got to just play; that's the biggest thing that I feel like that's changed from last year's team to this year's team. We're all locked in every single day. We come to practice, we're locked in and we're ready to go.”
The goal all along has been winning the Pac-12 Championship. Utah coaches and players know they will have some sort of postseason destination, but a championship is the driving motivator this season, especially after coming so close last year when Washington beat Utah on a fluke interception that was returned for the game’s only touchdown score.
And though everyone is on the same page, as is evidenced by how the team practices each week and talks about each game being their next and only immediate focus, that doesn’t mean that someone like Britain Covey, who is watching from the sideline in a likely redshirt season, doesn’t become a fan and dream for the sky.
“Oh, it's fun,” Covey said. “I can't think about it too much because it's really hard for me, but I'm a full-on fan right now bragging to my friends down south. I just lobby for Utah wherever I go, or with whoever I'm with.”
The College Football Playoff rankings will be released Tuesday at 5 p.m. MST on ESPN.
