Month: September 2005

What constitutes a perfect football weekend for The Ute Blog? Utah wins and byu loses. It has happend again.

1. Utah beat Air Force 38-35
2. byu lost to TCU at home 51-50 in overtime.

GO UTES!

Listening to Hot Ticket 700 last week I remember hearing a byu fan call in the show. He said he’d never go to a game at Rice-Eccles because the Utah fans were all drunks and that the stands smelled of alcohol. I’m here to rebut that call and I have a photo here that proves that all Utah fans are not drunks. This photo is of 3 nice ladies I met on the way into the game. Clearly this photo proves that byu fan wrong and shows that most Ute fans are respectable, sober fans.

There are more great Ute photos like this one in my photo gallery! Check them out.

It was a tale of two Ute teams last night. One Ute team was dominant offensively and strong on defense. The other Ute team was offensively stagnant and predictable, and the defense was like a big block of Swiss cheese with holes you could drive a truck through.

Just like the last time Air Force was in Rice-Eccles, they took their first possession and drove it right down the field for a TD. But the Utes came right back and answered with a TD of their own.

The period from the 2nd quarter through the 3rd quarter was stellar. The offense looked great and Johnson made some very crisp and accurate passes. The defense played the option perfectly and forced many punts and turnovers.

The bad

The fourth quarter was scary. We brought a large lead into the 4th, only to allow Air Force to score easily and nearly pull off a victory. The offense was terribly conservative, running predictable dive after dive up the middle for no gain. In short they were playing “not to lose” instead of “to win.” This team looked like the Ute team of a few years back, and not the team we’ve become accustomed to in the last couple of years.

This week’s Air Force game is very important. The winner of this game still has a chance to take the conference title. The loser will be 0-2 in the conference and pretty much nearly impossible to win it. The Utes MUST win this game.

Air Force is always tough to defend, and this year they’re passing a little bit more. It will be an interesting game. See you there…

GO UTES!

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to watch a ton of this game. I missed some completely and listened to much of it on the radio. It sounds to me like we were a little conservative on offense, and a bit porous on defense.

We ran the ball 80% of the time on 2nd down. The problem is that we didn’t get much on first down so we were calling running plays with 2nd and long? Sounds like a passing situation to me.

In the overtime there was an illegal pick which allowed TCU to score a TD to win the game. Too bad for the Utes. But if we’d held onto our 17-7 lead to begin with, that wouldn’t have happened.

TCU is apparently a condender in it’s new conference.

Ok, so we got the first road game and first loss under our belts. Lesson learned. We don’t have to worry about our 18 game winning streak any more. Lesson learned. Now lets go and play some great football the rest of the season.

GO UTES!