got and how enamored of them the media and bettors became. utah had played a soft schedule with 5 home conference games and hadn’t really been tested, except by mediocre Washington and Southern Cal (who beat them). Lots of teams can look impressive and run up gaudy stats beating up on bad teams. They hadn’t played anyone close to Oregon’s level until last night.

I was really surprised when I saw that utah was favored by almost a TD vs Oregon — I saw it as a tossup-type game at best. I also couldn’t understand how the CFP committee could rank them ahead of Oklahoma, a team with much better wins, a much stronger SOS, and better resume overall.

Even against Washington, their best win of the year, they were outplayed for 2 1/2 quarters, trailed at halftime, and needed some terrible turnovers to turn the game around in the 2nd half. And they only won by 5 points. Washington was pretty mediocre this year, but if they played utah 10 times, I’m not sure they wouldn’t win 5 of them.

USC beat them with a 3rd-string QB. Even crappy BYU outplayed them for a half before throwing a bad pick six and falling apart.