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Los Angeles • John Baxter has been following the University of Utah for a long time.

His father-in-law, Ron McBride, became its head football coach more than two decades ago, when Baxter was just starting his own college coaching career. Now, Baxter is the associate head coach and special teams coordinator for the USC Trojans, and on a sunny spring morning in the heart of the city, he's reflecting on the unforeseen developments and fortuitous circumstances that have delivered the Utes into the prestigious realm of the Pac-12 Conference — a league that over the years has produced some of the greatest athletes the country has ever seen.

Certainly, he's asked, nobody could have imagined that the Utes would ever ascend to such a remarkable position, even when they were enjoying some of their best seasons under McBride some 15 years ago.

"But I don't know that 15 years ago we would have foreseen cellphones being what they are," Baxter answers quickly, "or the Internet being what it is, or computers being what they are. Everything progresses."

And there you have it.

Cellphones, the Internet and the Utes in the Pac-12 — three things that changed the world as we know it.

To be sure, nothing will ever be the same for Utah, once it officially joins the league on July 1, along with the University of Colorado.

The prestige, the money, the power … everything will soon balloon to levels far beyond anything the Utes have ever known. The Utes will play in better facilities, control a larger budget, travel to nicer places — from sunny Tucson to coastal Seattle — recruit better athletes and enjoy closer connections with academic colleagues and alumni on the West Coast.

"There's a trite expression: We are who we are," says athletic director Chris Hill. "But we're not. We're somebody else now."

Big dreams, bigger reality

The dreams, too, can soar.

Now part of one of the powerful Bowl Championship Series leagues, the Utes will have a guaranteed path into the national championship picture for football, presuming they can maintain a level of competitiveness that has delivered them into the top six of the final BCS rankings twice in the past seven seasons.

But that's just the thing.

With all of the hope and excitement for the future comes a harsh reality — pressure on the Utes will skyrocket, too, and so will the competition, both on and off the field.

Not only will coaches, administrators such as Hill and even fans need to seriously step up their game in order to be competitive in a pond of much larger and more rapacious fish, but the athletes themselves will be facing a whole new level of opponent.

Instead of having to beat out maybe a couple of relatively modest rivals in order to win Mountain West Conference championships, the Utes are going to be crashing up against some of the nation's most dominating programs week after week, in every sport.

Stanford, USC, Washington, Oregon — these are the grown-ups the Utes are playing with now, and they have a championship tradition that puts every other league in America to shame.

They have 438 national team titles between them, and counting — and that doesn't even include nearly two dozen football titles that schools claim without official NCAA sanction.

In other words?

The Utes are basically the small-town tourist stepping into the big city for the first time, thrilled and awe-struck at the chaotic excitement of it all, yet also slowly realizing that — whoa — they might not be navigating their way across town as easily as they once did.

"It's the unknown," Hill says. "Everything you hear is, week after week after week, in every sport, it's going to be tough. And it's true. People don't understand that. You play Washington and then you dust yourself off and you go to Cal the next week. And then you go to Stanford. So it's tough sledding."

It's about the money

That's why Hill is urging patience to partner with passion, knowing it could take some time for the Utes to catch up in most sports.

The Utes will enter the Pac-10 with by far the lowest athletic budget in the league — their $31.8 million annual budget is at least $20 million behind all but two other teams — and they won't get a full share of the revenue from the league's stunning new $3 billion television deal until the 2014-2015 season.

Furthermore, much of the money they do receive in their first few years will have to go toward improving salaries, facilities and other resources just to get them into the Pac-12 neighborhood. Many of the Olympic sport programs in the Pac-12 are national powers that threaten to dominate the Utes.

"We're going to have to temper expectations, and we have to prioritize where we're going to focus our resources," Hill says.

The Utes have long fit the academic profile of the Pac-10, with a highly rated medical school and health-care network, a prestigious cancer research institute and a rating from The Center for Measuring University Performance at Arizona State that puts it squarely among its new conference colleagues.

Only when the University of Texas declined the league's overtures to join last summer did the door swing open for them, however, with the Pac-10 still needing another team to permit a championship football game that could act as an anchor to increase exposure and help sell its television rights.

To that extent, the Utes were simply in the right place at the right time.

But as Baxter knows, they also spent years and years building their program — football, in particular — to a high enough level that they could be viewed as a desirable candidate when the opportunity came along.

"It's been a slow, steady process for 20 years," he says.

That's not lost on football coaches around the league, not one of whom wanted to argue with the assessment of Arizona State's Dennis Erickson that the Utes "will come into this league and be very, very successful."

The Utes are, after all, a respectable 8-5 against Pac-12 teams over the past decade, and they caught the attention of the college football world with landmark victories in the Fiesta Bowl and the Sugar Bowl in the past seven years.

"They've proven over the years that they can play with anybody," said Cal coach Jeff Tedford.

"No doubt about it," agreed Oregon State coach Mike Riley. "I don't think there's one person in our league that would say different than that. I don't see how you could. They've been a top 25 or 10 team for a long time."

But this is a whole new era.

The only thing anybody knows for sure is that everything is going to be different from here on out. —

CONFERENCE OF CHAMPIONS

It's called the "Conference of Champions" for a reason — the Pac-10 has won more national team titles than any other conference:

Team and number of titles:

UCLA • 106

Stanford • 100

USC • 92

California • 30

Arizona State • 22

Colorado • 22

Utah • 20

Oregon • 18

Arizona • 17

Washington • 6

Oregon State • 3

Washington State • 2

TOTAL • 438

Utah won one men's basketball championship, nine women's gymnastics titles and 10 skiing crowns.

Colorado has won two women's cross country titles, three boxing championships and 17 skiing championships.

Source: NCAA

Note • Does not include football championships, which the NCAA does not officially designate. Instead, various polls and systems have been used to determine football champions. USC claims 11 titles, Cal 5, Washington 2, and Stanford and UCLA 1 each.