Utah football coach Ron McBride says it’s fine and well for his team to be proud of its 5-1 record, its four-game winning streak and its shutout last Saturday against Wyoming?which came into the game with one of the conference’s more potent offenses and left looking about as formidable as the Velveteen Rabbit.
He’s certainly happy, after all, that the Utes have made such drastic strides from last year’s miserable flop.
However, what he’s trying to impress upon his players is that every accomplishment they’ve had thus far this year carries with it a sizeable asterisk.
Four of Utah’s six games have come to Rice-Eccles Stadium where?in spite of drawing a meager 34,065 ticket-buyers (and considerably fewer actual attendees) per game?the team has some semblance of a home-field advantage; and of the U’s six opponents to this point, only Oregon (which was ranked No. 7 in the nation at the time) qualified as a top notch team.
Now, however, things start to get tough.
At Tuesday’s “Coaches Huddle” at the Green Street Cafe, McBride said his team would be facing a different kind of competition for the rest of the year, starting this coming Saturday at Colorado State.
“This is very important?this game will tell a lot about us,” he said. “I did say some nice things to [the team] after the Wyoming game, but I also reminded them that game’s over. Now, they’ve got to keep an edge and take nothing for granted if they want to keep winning.”
The coach’s tactic of stressing to the players not to get overly impressed with what they’ve done has apparently sunk in.
Junior linebacker Brooks Bahr said the players realize they haven’t proven anything yet, and he acknowledged that the next few weeks would be very telling of whether the success experienced to this point will be indicative of the season as a whole, or is merely a byproduct of home games versus weak opponents.
“We’re getting to the meat of the schedule right now. We’ll play Colorado State and UNLV?and those are both away games,” Bahr said. “Now we’ll see what we’re made of.”
He added that taking on CSU in Fort Collins would especially be a barometer for the Utes. After all, though the Rams are just 3-4 overall, they were the preseason conference favorites and have shown tremendous improvement in recent weeks.
“We think we’re a pretty good team, and we’ll see this weekend. This is huge?Colorado State is a great team with a great offense; we’ll be able to gauge ourselves and see how good we really are.”