The Utah football team will be facing Northwestern in the Las Vegas Bowl next week. But given the significant changes that have occurred across the college football landscape in recent years, bowl prep, quite frankly, isn’t what it used to be.
“It’s so dramatically different, it’s not even close,” Utes coach Kyle Whittingham said after Tuesday’s practice. “I’m sure every team in the country is having similar issues, where your team has been dramatically changed since the last regular-season game until the bowl game — with the exception of the playoff teams. … You’re just going to be a different situation for your bowl game.”
He’s not wrong.
A Utah team already depleted by a rash of injuries to significant contributors has been further thinned by transfer portal defections and NFL draft declarations.
Receiver Mikey Matthews and quarterbacks Bryson Barnes and Nate Johnson are the team’s most significant names to enter the portal (though Barnes has committed to remaining with the Utes through the bowl game, and is slated to start). Meanwhile, safeties Cole Bishop and Sione Vaki (the latter also being a two-way standout), receiver Devaughn Vele, and offensive lineman Keaton Bills have all announced their intent to enter the draft.
None of the potential draftees have said publicly whether they might play in the bowl game yet. Whittingham said Tuesday that while only three of the maximum five draft evaluations the program requested have been returned as yet, he nevertheless knows who is in and who is out. And while he wouldn’t spill the beans, not wanting to spoil any potential announcement to come by a player, he still telegraphed the reality of the situation in a radio interview with ESPN 700′s Bill Riley, noting that, in the past few years anyway, those who declare for the draft have typically eschewed their team’s bowl game, so as to avoid potential injury.
The coach himself has been pulled in multiple directions.
A week ago, after Utah’s first bowl-schedule practice, he noted that he’d not yet had time to watch film of Northwestern because he’d been on a recruiting trip. On Tuesday, he spoke to the many demands on his attention right now.
“Yeah, this is the most — I don’t want to say ‘difficult,’ but the busiest time of the year,” said Whittingham. “You’re trying to get ready for a game, you’re recruiting at full tilt, Signing Day is [Dec. 20], you’ve got the portal, you’re trying to recruit your own guys and keep them intact while following what’s going on in the portal, you’ve got NIL. There’s no other time of the year for a coach that’s busier than what you’re going through right now.”
The players, too, are doing their best to navigate the chaos and remain as focused as possible through all the noise.
Some just shrug their shoulders at all the peripheral distractions.
“It ain’t nothing new to us,” said running back Ja’Quinden Jackson. “We all knew it was coming.”
Maybe so. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy — particularly for someone like Barnes.
He’s in the precarious situation of trying to help out his current team while also trying to find his next one.
“Yeah, no doubt that this situation is stressful — you’ve got finals going on, you’re preparing for a game. You just have to control what you can control; at the end of the day, let the cards fall into the place where they’re going to,” Barnes said. “… I don’t know what’s going to be there in three or four weeks, but in two weeks, I know we played Northwestern in Vegas.”
He did note that being a quarterback in the transfer portal means it’s inevitable that his phone is buzzing pretty much constantly. However, he added that he made the decision to put it on silent, while allowing his agent to “[take] the load off me a little bit.”
Tight end Landen King, who joined the Utes in May from Auburn after entering the spring transfer portal, said his own experience with it has caused him to have some serious empathy for those navigating the process right now.
He did plenty of research beforehand, putting together a list of programs he had interest in, and another list of programs he thought might have interest in him on account of positional opportunity.
Not everyone puts that kind of work in, and leaving their fate totally up to chance can make life difficult.
“I just feel sorry for so many people that don’t have a plan, because the transfer portal can get stressful. I had a plan, and it was still stressful,” King said. “So I mean, imagine going in there not knowing your future, not knowing what’s gonna happen. It can get scary for real, so my heart goes out to a lot of people in the portal right now.”
He added that he felt scared initially to enter the portal, then felt lucky to have a couple of programs reach out pretty immediately, affording him the comfort of knowing he’d at least have a landing spot somewhere. But not everyone gets that luxury, and many have to sweat out the process.
King believes usage of the transfer portal has grown exponentially from even seven months ago when he used it. And while he would never begrudge anyone from trying to find a good situation, he can’t help but feel like there are perhaps too many players leaving already-good situations in search of greener pastures that don’t exist.
Along those lines, receivers coach Alvis Whitted noted Wednesday that Matthews’ decision to depart caught him off-guard.
“It was a bit of a shock. It was a bit of a shock, to say the least,” Whitted said. “But we have capable guys here in our offense — guys that have played, and young guys that are growing and continuing to progress in our offense.”
Whittingham, who said the Utes would have “some portal announcements in the next three to 12 days,” explained his process for bringing players in via the portal.
“Just trying to fill up the holes and fill in the gaps where you had guys you thought were probably going to come back, maybe were gonna come back, and now they’re not, and the young guys that are behind them aren’t quite ready,” he said. “That’s when you go to the portal and try to get the ready-made guys.”
In the meantime, though, for the Las Vegas Bowl, the Utes will have to turn to people already in-house, some of whom have seen little or no action, some of whom will be getting dramatic upticks in their on-field responsibilities.
“It’s been kind of fun, honestly, seeing people [adopt] the next-man-up mentality,” said King. “But we’ve been like that the whole season, so it’s nothing different.”
Weeeeeeellllll … yes and no, right?
Granted, the Utes have had a ton of significant injuries this season, forcing some guys up the depth chart.
But surely, with the transfer portal and draft declarations taken into account, it’s at an altogether different level now?
“Man, I don’t know,” said Barnes, pausing momentarily to consider. “This year is crazy.”
Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
Follow @tribjazz