When Utah goes head to head with BYU that is bad for BYU since Utah has conference affiliation on their side.

As Utah succeeds, they will go after a higher caliber of recruit and hence steal fewer BYU recruits. When BYU and Utah were both in the MWC, there were years where they went head to head for as many as 20 common recruits. This year, there is much less overlap, because Utah is focusing more on kids from Texas, California, and Florida with no LDS affiliation. Even their local recruits wouldn’t have BYU as their second choice; Van Fillinger has no desire to go to an LDS school, Ritchie’s second choice is Stanford or ASU, and the OT whose name I can’t remember has SC as his top choice along with Utah.