Now that the Utah Utes have been knocked from the ranks of the unbeatens, are they out of the College Football Playoff talk?
We saw some crazy things happen on Saturday in the world of college football, despite the fact that the week as a whole didn’t look good on paper. One thing that we did see that may have trumped everything else was the No. 3 Utah Utes going on the road and getting throttled by the USC Trojans 42-24, who sit at 4-3 on the year now. Las Vegas tried to tell us that Utah was on upset alert, yet when we combined all the factors, we didn’t want to listen to anything about the Trojans being the favorite.
Well, again, we were wrong. So, with that being the case, many will be wondering whether or not the Utah Utes are out of College Football Playoff contention.
Of course, with the initial rankings not even released yet and it being just Week 8 of the season, you can’t go out of your way to say that they’re definitely eliminated. However, they do have a lot of work to do.
Utah is not out of the race just yet for the Pac-12 South title, but they obviously are best suited to win out the rest of the way. Then, presumably, they would have to beat a very good Stanford team, who doesn’t look like they plan on losing anytime soon.
When the initial rankings are released on Nov. 3, because of this loss, Utah might not get a lot of respect from the committee. But, as we saw with Ohio State last season, there is time for a one-loss team to make their case the rest of the way and that’s exactly what Utah has to get done. They need to show everyone that this was just a bad night against the Trojans and thoroughly take care of things the rest of the way.
There’s a lot left to go here, and this was a major setback for Utah — but it wasn’t a backbreaking one.