Any school on a run will draw eyeballs. BYU would. USU would. Utah has been on a run.
All of this conference/realignment talk is about conferences and media platforms placing bets on teams' abilities to consistently draw eyeballs over a decade or longer. The minute Utah has a bad year or two, all the eyes you talk about disappear. As they do with most schools. There are only a few out there that continue to draw viewers, regardless of the year. Oregon/Washington are either in that group or very close to it. Utah isn't. That is the reason people are mocking pig.