Utah Utes, Urban Meyer, And The BCS Wall

A lot of things have changed in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Bowl Championship Series over the last few years. With teams like Boise State and Texas Christian finally beginning to get their due as legitimate national title contenders, the major conferences with automatic BCS berths seem poised to lose their stranglehold on the championship title. To look at the true origins of the breakdown of that stranglehold, one need only go back to Urban Meyer’s time as the coach of the Utah Utes. The Utes play in the Mountain West Conference, one of the smaller NCAA groupings that were not afforded the automatic berth provided to major conference teams when the BCS was first established. As a result, no team from a conference such as the MWC was invited to a BCS game – that is, until Urban Meyer arrived at the University of Utah.

The Utes can play

From the start, Meyer made it clear that his team’s goal at Utah would be to play the fastest, hardest type of football possible, and provide everyone a show they would never forget. With his spread option offense, he was determined to make the Utes a national powerhouse. Of course, the Utes’ 118 year history had already provided many highlights, including 22 titles in their conference and more than 600 total wins. They also held the best postseason record in history, with twelve victories in the fifteen bowl games they had played. Obviously, Meyer knew that he had a team that could contend for any title, ad he set out to d just that.

Breaking the BCS mold

In their very first season under Myer’s leadership, the Utes won 10 games, and another conference championship. After a victory over Southern Mississippi in their postseason bowl – a shutout that demonstrated that the Utes not only had a high-scoring offense, but a bone-crushing defense as well, there was no denying that the Utes were a legitimate national power. In the second year of Meyer’s tenure, he would take the Utes even farther. That year’s undefeated team set new Utah records for scoring, and won the conference yet again. More importantly, their success on the field all but forced the BCS to invite them to a Bowl Championship Series postseason contest, making them the first team from a non-major conference to compete in the BCS. In that BCS match up – in which they faced Pittsburgh – the Utah Utes thoroughly dominated their major conference opponent. To cap it all off, the team was ranked fourth in the nation in the season’s final Associated Press tally.

Meyer’s two seasons as the Utes’ coach had broken new ground with the Bowl Championship Series, as the BCS selection committee was forced to finally acknowledge that top level football was being played in places outside of the traditional power conferences.

As a sign of just how much things had changed, the Utes earned another BCS spot in 2008-2009- a bowl match up in which they crushed the Alabama Crimson Tide team that would win the national title just a year later.

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