So maybe this won't be the largest College Football preview ever but, it is at least my largest College Football preview ever. Because nobody wants to read 6,000 words on a single page, I had to break this down into a few articles. Welcome to Part One! Just so you're warned, this is the smallest of the 3 posts.
The 2016-2017 season was fun, unless you root for Alabama. In which case I don't care about your feelings because you have enough titles to keep yourself warm at night. So now it's time to look at what we have in store for this next season! I am planning on doing a full breakdown of BYU and Utah's seasons in today's piece, followed by a preview of each of the conferences on Wednesday, and then my postseason preview with my picks for the New Year's 6 and playoffs on Friday.
BYU had a very interesting season last year. They lost 4 games the whole year by a combined 7 points. That makes it seem like they were just a few moments away from going undefeated, until you actually remember what happened. They games against Utah and Boise State that could have gone either way, but their other losses against both UCLA and West Virginia required furious 4th quarter comebacks to even get close!
This all being said, I do think that BYU is better this year, and will surprise people who saw how much they struggled last season. They'll have better receivers than last year and that will make the offense much better. I actually have BYU going 12-1 in the regular season! They'll start off the year crushing Portland State before heading to Houston and being humiliated by LSU. LSU is good, and I expect them to be pushing for the playoff by the end of the year. I think BYU is just the first of many teams that will get embarrassed by the Tigers.
Following that is the Holy War against Utah. This will finally be the year they break the losing streak. I'll go into more detail about this game in the Utah section because I think this game has more to do with Utah being worse this year than BYU being better.
BYU's next game is against Wisconsin. The Badgers lost a lot of good pieces off their defense, and that will hurt them at the start of the year, until their new defense can come together. I think this BYU offense could score up to 21 points, which should be just enough to outscore Wisconsin's offense. So for my big surprise upset of the season I'm going to take BYU 21 Wisconsin 20 in an ugly brutal game.
After that win BYU has to go up to Utah State and play. Unfortunately for Aggie fans I don't think that Utah State is going to be competitive this season, and BYU should win this easily. The next game BYU hosts Boise State. Boise is pretty good, they'll have a good offense and a stingy defense. Whoever makes the least amount of mistakes is going to win this game, neither team really has an advantage over the other. In the end, I think BYU will pull off the upset since the game is at home.
Next, BYU plays at Mississippi State. The Bulldogs are in a bit of a rebuild and luckily for BYU they didn't seem to add that many great players! Last year's game was a nail-biter, even though it probably shouldn't have been. I thought that the game between these two was BYU's most disappointing game. Their offense was terrible, so I'm hoping that this year with a better QB, they won't be as stagnant against the decent (but not great) defense of the Bulldogs. They should be able to find a way to score this year, and pull off another huge victory for the program.
The rest of their year consists of sneakily decent teams but none of them should be able to pose much of a threat. ECU is always good for an upset during the season (especially at home), and Hawaii isn't going to be a pushover this year. With that said, BYU is better than all the rest of these teams and should win out the rest of the year.
So that makes BYU 12-1 with just the one loss to LSU in week 2. That should be good enough to end up ranked somewhere around 10-15 depending on how their opponents do the rest of the season. BYU isn't tied into any bowl game this year, but with how great of a record they'll have, they should get into a bowl. I have them making the New Year's 6 and playing the ACC champion in the Cotton Bowl.
Now for Utah.
I'm pretty sure that people could write the same thing for Utah every year and no one would notice. They are going to be fantastic defensively. The offense is going to be an issue. This year Utah tried to address this by getting a new offensive coordinator that runs a more high-power passing system, but Utah's problem isn't that they don't throw the ball enough, it's that their QBs and WRs aren't great! If you can't throw or catch the ball then why throw at all? I thought they tried to throw the ball too much last year when they should have been running the ball 80% of the time. But now it looks like they're going to try and throw this year, and with the talent that they have I just see that making the offense worse. More importantly it's going to give other teams more opportunities to score! Last year Utah was 2-4 in games against teams that scored 27 points or more, and 5-4 in one-possession games. One extra possession during the game for the opponent could get them over that magic 27 point mark. I feel Utah's defense can handle that in most of their games, but giving the top teams in the Pac 12 another possession could be disastrous. If the opponent scores one extra time, a couple of those wins could easily flip over to losses.
With that being said they should still have a good season because they are better than most of the teams in the conference. Their season starts off with a win against North Dakota, which leads them to the Holy War against BYU. I think that Utah lost too much to the NFL last year to be able to rely on their defense to win early on in the season so this game against BYU will be a huge test for the offense, and they won't be able to live up to the challenge. It's going to be a close game but I think it will end up 27-20 in favor of BYU. Utah runs into San Jose State after that and will crush them because SJSU is going to be pretty bad.
Once Utah gets into their conference schedule though everything changes. Now their real challenges start up and they can start caring about the games. Arizona is first on their Pac 12 schedule and the Utes will still be a bad match-up for the Wildcats. Arizona has a good offense, but bad defense. Utah however has an excellent defense, but a mediocre offense. The better defense usually wins these games.
Their next game is at home against Stanford. This picture describes how I feel about these two teams... The one thing that could tilt the scales is Utah's change in offense. Stanford typically wants opponents to throw the ball more often, so Utah's offense should be playing right into their hands. However, Utah can still run the ball better than Stanford and that should be enough to keep them ahead throughout the game. I'm taking Utah 17-14. This should keep Utes fans dreams of a Rose Bowl intact and keep the Utes in the top 20 leading to a potential College Gameday match-up against USC.
The Trojans will be one of the toughest teams in the country this season, but Utah has the defense to keep it close. The Utes have one of the top defenses in college football and they can keep anyone from scoring when they want to. The problem is that USC also has one of the top defenses in college football and can stop anyone when they want to. This game will come down to which of these offenses can get a score in the second half, and I trust Sam Darnold and the Trojans way more than I trust whoever will be running the Utes offense at this point in the season.
That loss will knock the Utes out of Rose Bowl potential, but they can still have a pretty good season, if they can run through the rest of the Pac 12 season. They should be able to get through the next couple of weeks without any losses. Arizona State is going to be bad this year, and by this point in the season they'll have quit on their coach and be ready to move on to next year. This should be a pretty easy win for Utah. The next week is Oregon, who has been steadily getting worse every year. This year they'll have a complete collapse and the Utes should win this by 30.
Next up I'm going to lay out a trend that the Utes follow. Every year they beat a team that they shouldn't, and then will also lose a game at home to a team that is much worse than them. This year I think these next two games, UCLA and Washington State, will be those for Utah Utah shouldn't beat UCLA this year, I think this is the year the UCLA defense and offense finally come together. They're going to come into this game undefeated with wins over Texas A&M, Stanford, Colorado, and Washington and will probably be in the top 5 in the country. Then the Utes defense is going to completely shut down that offense and get a huge upset like they usually do. But then in comes Washington State and all of the momentum that Utah got from that win over UCLA goes away when the Cougars hang 50 on Utah. I have no logical reason why Washington State will beat Utah. The Utes are the better team, but they always seem to blow one home game to a lesser team every season. Any of these home games could be the one, but my guess is that it's this one after a big win and then looking forward to playing another top ranked team in Washington the next week.
Now Washington is going to be upset and angry coming in to this game because they'll have just lost their big Pac 12 North showdown with Stanford and will be trying to keep their title game hopes alive with a win over Utah. This is the game where I think Utah's new offensive policy could hurt them. Washington is good enough to take advantage of that one extra possession. Utah is probably the better team and will hold a 3-7 point lead the whole time until the end, but then Washington will score late and win 28-24. The Utes will then go back home to take on Colorado, and after having such a great year last year the Buffaloes will take a major step backwards this season after losing so much talent to the NFL. Utah will take advantage and win their last game of the regular season.
With such an up and down season, Utes fans won't be pleased with the overall record. That being said, the team should still end up 6-3 in conference which is good for a tie for 2nd in the South. They'll head to El Paso for the Sun Bowl to face a pretty good team from the ACC.
Please leave a comment below if you want to tell me how wrong I am, or contact me on twitter @mbishky or @tripleSpodcast. I'll have the conference preview's up on Wednesday, then the postseason preview on Friday.
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