This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In the buildup to the Las Vegas Bowl, I'm sticking to this rule: Never tell people that they should love someone or something.
Yet if observers outside of the state are completely embracing the Las Vegas Bowl matchup between Utah and BYU, Utahns probably should consider acting interested as well. That includes the Ute followers who justifiably spent the 2015 season anticipating something much bigger and better than the No. 6 game among the Pac-12's affiliated bowls.
Even as an advocate of the rivalry, I've been surprised by the response from the rest of the world this week. Maybe it is just a commentary on the bowl saturation, but this game is being widely acclaimed.
ESPN.com's Ivan Maisel cites Utah-BYU, Pittsburgh-Navy and Oregon-TCU as "my favorite non-New Year's Six bowls." With a similar disclaimer, Yahoo's Dr. Saturday ranks only Oregon-TCU and North Carolina-Baylor ahead of Utah-BYU. SB Nation's scoring system of evaluating the bowls for watchability penalizes the Las Vegas Bowl because of BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall's outgoing status, yet lists the game in the category of "You owe it to yourself to tune in." And if anything, Mendenhall's presence should make the game more interesting.
Other sites also list the game in their top five, outside of the New Year's Six. So only Stanford in the Rose Bowl and possibly Oregon in the Alamo Bowl are being viewed as Pac-12 teams worth watching more than Utah in the coming weeks.
The Utes wanted bowl committees to treat them like the conference's No. 3 team, just as the final College Football Playoff rankings did. In a weird way, with help from BYU, that's exactly what has happened.
The reality is that once the Utes played themselves out of the Rose Bowl or another New Year's Six game by losing twice in November, they hardly could have landed a better platform than Las Vegas. San Diego would be a nicer destination, and the Bay Area or El Paso also would have offered Power 5 opponents. None of those bowls would get outside attention to same degree as this Utah-BYU pairing, though. Maybe this game was not the best the Utes could ask for as of mid-October when they were 6-0 and ranked No. 3 in the AP Top 25, but it works now.
Amid the advantages of belonging to the Pac-12, the Utes cannot match the brand names and California alumni bases of USC and UCLA, picked ahead of them in bowl selections. In this year's case, the opportunity to bring back Mike Leach and his offense to western Texas made Washington State appealing to the Sun Bowl.
If Devontae Booker could have completed the regular season as a healthy, 1,500-yard rusher with some degree of Heisman Trophy consideration and the Utes had reached the Pac-12 title game, they would have more marketing power. In the absence of such an attraction, Las Vegas is a reasonable spot, and the circumstances will make either team's bid for a 10th win of the season more meaningful.
If the goal is national attention, staging a rivalry game in a bowl setting is very good strategy, as it turns out. That kind of event hardly ever happens, and people are noticing. Several rankings of the 2015-16 bowls have endorsed the matchup, listing Utah's game as No. 1 or No. 2 among Pac-12 contests, other than the Rose Bowl.
Believe it or not, facing BYU in Las Vegas will bring more attention to the Utes than playing the likes of Wisconsin, Nebraska or Miami in December. The same is true of BYU, which benefits more from playing Utah in Las Vegas than any available Pac-12 opponent, beyond USC.
That's because the bowl schedule is so crowded that distinguishing yourself becomes difficult. The Dec. 19 version of Utah-BYU is stirring some national interest, and that can only be a good thing for everybody involved.
Twitter: @tribkurt