Remember those old television commercials for a camera company featuring Andre Agassi in which he dipped his sunglasses down and oh-so-cooly declared, “Image is everything”?
It is said that ad campaign haunted the tennis great for years, and while some criticized it for promoting style over substance — which was big at the time — it also prompted a divisive philosophical discussion among the thoughtful or perhaps it was among the really, really bored, some believing there were at least a few drops of veracity in the proclamation, some saying, “No, no … image is nothing.”
Well. If the former is partially true, if image reflects style and substance, if it represents not just what’s on the surface, but what’s going on two or three layers down, that’s both good news for and says something important about Utah football. Something important and something hard-earned.
In the comprehensive, Kyle Whittingham’s program has an image, all right, a reputation of being a buzzard-tough outfit, an annual collection of dudes you could see working on an oil rig or melting down steel over at the plant or mining for coal 2,000 feet down or fishing for the latest catch on a distressed boat in the Bering Sea or maybe even teaching fourth-graders at a local elementary school. Guys who get a messy job done regardless of the degree of difficulty. They play football the way Bo Schembechler would have wanted it played — with a socket wrench in one hand and a crankshaft in the other, all governed by unusual grit.
Whittingham gets credit for setting the tone for all of that.
But there’s more — necessary stuff, like talent, skill and speed.
That’s the rep. It’s been like that for years, but on a national scale it went throttle up in more recent seasons, beyond vague memories of the Fiesta Bowl at the conclusion of the 2004 run and the Sugar Bowl after 2008. Can you believe those wins were some 20 and 16 years ago now? Whoa. Making an almost yearly trip to Pac-12 championship games, even without wins in the Rose Bowl or any other bowl over the Utes’ past five postseason appearances, including two losses to Northwestern, one to Texas, one to Ohio State and one to Penn State, hasn’t diminished the way Utah football is thought of, not among many fans, many national football observers.
function onSignUp() { const token = grecaptcha.getResponse(); if (!token) { alert("Please verify the reCAPTCHA!"); } else { axios .post( "https://8c0ug47jei.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/newsletter/checkCaptcha", { token, env: "PROD", } ) .then(({ data: { message } }) => { console.log(message); if (message === "Human
