Or so says Gordon Monson of The Salt Lake Tribune.
The No. 8 Utes can feel some satisfaction about their being 9-0, supposedly on course for a BCS bowl, and the No. 15 Cougars can handle being 8-1, despite higher aspirations earlier this season, until TCU blasted them to smithereens.
But based on what they’ve shown thus far, neither of these teams is as good as the record suggests. That’s not a mean-spirited rip, it’s simply an obvious truth. They just do not belong, not so far, among the country’s elite.
The goings-on last weekend are Exhibit A: squeaking by with three-point wins over competition that wouldn’t create much of a threat to the teams ranked around them, not even in a season where upsets have been plentiful.
Utah made the New Mexico Lobos look like the New York Giants on Saturday night, unimpressively edging them, 13-10. We all get sick of judging and guessing who would do what against whom in college football, but . . . anybody think Penn State or Florida or Oklahoma or any of the teams ranked ahead of Utah would struggle the way the Utes did to beat the 4-6 Lobos? Would any of those ranked teams put just 13 points on them?
I completely agree, but this is what you get when you have a college football system that’s so broken. Utah is No. 8 because they’re undefeated. They’re undefeated because they don’t play anybody on a consistent basis. So every year we have to wait until they either are upset by a lesser opponent and therefore justify not being ranked that high, or get screwed out of a chance to play for a title because their conference/schedule is weak.
This is unavoidable with the way college football is set up.
