The goal is to shape stats in a way to make Utah look unfavorably. By focusing on teams that "finished' with a winning record but lost to Utah, you're deliberately skewing the data to make it look like all of Utah's wins were against Oregon State type teams.

But you're really just leveraging the parity of the conference. It's very difficult in the Pac-12 to consistently stand out year-in, year out. The only school who has really done that at the top is UW.

If you look at it from the perspective of recruiting, national brand, money, etc. You have USC on another plane. Then UW, Oregon, Stanford, UCLA and maybe ASU the next level down.

I'd argue that few conferences have the same tier structure with so many solid, second-tier type programs that are on the same level with a 9-game schedule.

Then you have Utah. A bottom tier program that has outperformed many in the upper tier in their own conference over the last 5 years.

That shakes up the conference dynamic as well and makes.

But once you take out that 9th game or back-to-back road game and the losses counted to Utah, you'll start to see more programs in the winning column.