Utah State at Utah

Utah was a perfect 13-0 a year ago. Despite losing a lot of talent to graduation, this is a team with a lot of depth and excellent recruiting every year. So the drop is not a huge one. They have to replace the best QB in school history but there are three viable candidates, and the offense returns many talented skill players at RB and WR. The defense is good and loaded with talent, especially at linebacker. It will be the defense that carries the team this time around. We go from one of the Mountain West's annual powers, to one of the WAC's annual losers, and the weak sister in the state. The Aggies finished just 3-9 a year ago and have a lot of returning players, but the problem is that the talent level here vs. the Utes is a very wide gap. That disparity is quite big as evidenced by the fact that the last five years these teams have met, the scores add up to 219-41 for Utah, or an average win of 34 points per game. There have been three games decided by 40+ points in the last five years. Utah is the choice in this one.