This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

If the NOAA handed out a championship trophy — sanctioned by its own National Weather Service — to a college football team, Utah might get it.

The Utes are one of the best bad-weather teams in the land.

They've proved that the past two weeks, beating a couple of Pac-12 opponents in conditions better suited, outside of a 1960s Packers-Vikings game at Lambeau, for polar-bear wrangling than for football.

In each case, the lower the barometric pressure dropped, the higher the Utes flew.

As offensive tackle John Cullen — a California kid, no less — put it, the environs against UCLA at Rice-Eccles Stadium and at Washington State on Saturday were "perfect."

In each game, shovel crews had to clear snow off the field for lines to be seen. The surface at Rice-Eccles looked as though a Zamboni might work. At a half-empty Martin Stadium in Pullman, snow was stacked up everywhere, and that was before another front rolled in. The game-time temperature was 27 degrees, and it nose-dove from there. When the wind blew, it darn near ripped your face off.

Here's the thing, though: The colder and stormier it got, the more Utah dialed in.

If the Pac-12 would allow it, the Utes should schedule some combination of November road games at Montana, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Hampshire, Alaska-Anchorage, Bavarian Alps College and the University of Siberia — every single year.

They'd kick ice.

In the dark of the frigid night on Saturday, after Utah had marched straight past its early mistakes, its inept offense, the extreme elements, and the home team, to win in overtime, as steam rose up off their heads as they slipped and slid while walking around the back of the stadium to get to their locker room, they properly celebrated what they had overcome.

They knew it was … well, cool.

The reason any of this is important is because teams that are able to redirect their fortunes in the middle of a game — on the road, with so much adversity and such difficult, uncomfortable circumstances around them — are teams that are dangerous.

Yeah, it was just Washington State the Utes beat, but a team that weathers the storms that Utah has weathered this season, figuratively and literally, losing its first four conference games, sometimes looking bad en route, and now winning four straight, shows something positive afoot.

The Utes may not be world-beaters this season. But they are fighters. "These guys don't quit," is the way Kyle Whittingham put it Saturday night, as the Utes continued to celebrate and the snow continued to fall.

GORDON MONSON hosts "The Gordon Monson Show" weekdays from 2-6 p.m. on 97.5 FM/1280 AM The Zone. He can be reached at gmonson@sltrib.com. Twitter: @GordonMonson.