Kyle Whittingham was the last man out of Utah’s locker room. It was 12:29 a.m. It was Sunday morning.
The Utah coach had a white towel around his neck and reading glasses balanced on the tip of his nose. He picked up a box lunch and balanced it in one hand; he was watching some of the painful game video on an iPad, grasped in his other hand.
In the 50 minutes that passed since Arizona won 37-30 in double overtime, Whittingham had commenced a coaching autopsy on what had gone wrong.
Four buses were loaded and waiting for the Utah coach on Vine Avenue near Fourth Street, where it was middle-of-the-night quiet. A young man wearing a blue jacket with an Arizona logo tapped Whittingham on the shoulder and asked if he would pose for a photo.
Surprisingly, Whittingham did. He even smiled at the camera. No hard feelings, right? Two Utah fans approached and asked if the coach would sign poster boards with “GO UTES” slogans. He juggled his box lunch and signed without protest.
Over the last hour, Utah had gone from being a player on college football’s big board, to one whose dreams of a Rose Bowl and a run to the playoffs have been seriously impaired. When will a school like Utah ever be in that position again?
The college football season seems to pass in a blur. At 5:45 Saturday evening, Utah arrived full of promise and ambition at Arizona Stadium. Its arrival was noted by the squeal of a five-motorcycle escort of policemen dressed in black.
It would be the color of the night for the Utes, black, but it was Arizona that all but arrived under the cover of darkness.
About seven hours later, in the middle of the night, those same five policemen waited to escort the Utes to the airport. This time they did not use sirens.
Whittingham boarded the lead bus and took a front seat, next to his wife, Jamie. There were no pleasantries; he took a bite of a sandwich and began studying the X’s and O’s on his iPad.
The Utes wouldn’t arrive at their homes until 4 a.m. When Whittingham awakened Sunday, if he got any sleep at all, the damage was tangible. Utah had slipped from No. 10 to No. 18 in the AP poll. That’s one spot below Navy. The Utes have vanished from talk connected to the glamorous college football playoffs.
As Utah’s buses left Vine Avenue, light illuminated the bottom floor of the Lowell-Stevens football complex. Arizona’s director of athletic medicine, trainer Randy Cohen, could be seen through a window. The celebration had ended; Cohen was deep at work.
He knows the game-day drill. Cohen has been up late, figuratively and literally, all season. One night it’s Scooby Wright, another it’s Anu Solomon. On Saturday, it was starting linebacker Jake Matthews, who injured his foot in a goal-line play during a tense fourth quarter stand.
Cohen scheduled X-Rays, ordered medication, arranged a meeting with a surgeon and gave Matthews the bad news: he’ll likely be out six months, including spring practice.
When the Wildcats meet ASU in Saturday’s Territorial Cup, they’ll almost have to invent a depth chart at linebacker.
There always seems to be a price to pay after a college football game. On Saturday, Utah lost its stature and Arizona lost yet another injured player.
Matthews was part of an uplifting fourth quarter and overtime defense that played its best football of the season, a pride-saving, bowl-eligible performance that few could’ve predicted. Utah snapped 32 plays in the fourth quarter/overtime, and gained just 81 yards. Points? Three.
Jeff Worthy forced a fumble, Sir Thomas Jackson, Anthony Lopez and Sani Fuimaono combined to sack Utah quarterback Travis Wilson twice, when anything but a sack might’ve lost the game.
No wonder those in the ZonaZoo rushed the field. At Arizona, it was the Game of the Year in a season that seemed destined to be a lingering disappointment.
The Arizona team that knocked Utah off track is unrecognizable from the one that started the season 73 days ago with a victory over UTSA. Gerhard de Beer, the Pac-12 shot put champion, is now a starting guard. Jared Baker, not Nick Wilson, leads the team in total yards. In its last two victories, Jerrard Randall, not Solomon, has led Arizona’s winning drives.
Scooby Wright stands on the sidelines in shorts and sneakers.
When Rich Rodriguez sat behind a microphone for his post-game press briefing Saturday, the clock literally struck midnight.
“I don’t think a lot of folks thought it would happen,” he said.
Even Prince Charming would’ve been impressed.
