UCLA Football Preview: Utah Head Coach Kyle Whittingham is Back for His 21st Season
While Whittingham has been around forever, the Utes will have a new face calling the offense and some new guys on special teams.
It’s hard to believe that it’s football season already. Yeah, I knew it was coming. After all, EA Sports College Football 26 was released last month and I have been playing as Nico Iamaleava since release day. I’m now six seasons into my dynasty and I’m on a run like UCLA Football has never seen before. But that’s what my wife likes to call “fake football”, even if it gets me in the mood for the real thing.
Well, this Saturday, the real thing returns for another season. I continue to remain hopeful that the Bruins will show improvement over last season even though the overall college football landscape is significantly different from how it was even just a few months ago.
We saw how much the CFP, NIL and the Transfer Portal changed the game a few years ago, but now, the settlement in House v. NCAA is going to make the changes that came from the CFP, NIL and the Portal look like a speed bump.
How will all of the changes affect the future of Bruin football? I wish I owned a DeLorean and a copy of Gray’s Sports Almanac so I could tell you.
Has AD Martin Jarmond set up the UCLA Athletic Department for success in this rapidly changing environment? I sure hope so.
But these are questions that will likely take years before we have answers.
Right now, I can’t even predict how DeShaun Foster’s media blackout will affect next season’s recruiting class.
But I am here to look at the brightside: After years of being shut out of being able to cover player interviews and media scrums, I’m here to welcome Ben Bolch, BRO and whomever is covering the UCLA beat for the Southern California Newsgroup to our world! At least, sort of. They will all still be able to cover the postgame news conferences in person. So, my message to them is that it could be even worse than it is. LOL
Alright, enough about that stuff. Let’s get to some meat and potatoes.
This week, UCLA kickoffs the season at home against the Utah Utes. The Bruins are facing their former Pac-12 foes for the first time since both schools left the conference for the Big Ten and Big Twelve, respectively.
It’s almost a shame that this game is being played at the Rose Bowl in Week One instead of sometime in October because we all know what a Week One crowd at the Rose Bowl looks like.
Of course, the good news( and yes, it is good news) is that this game will not kickoff until 8 pm PT. The reason it’s good news is all because of two words: Bowling. Green.
Yes, I still have some PTSD from the heat we had at the Rose Bowl three seasons ago and, lest you think that the fact that it’s been a little cooler this week than during last week’s heat wave, it looks like the afternoon high at the Rose Bowl on Saturday will peak out at a toasty 92°F. So, while it still may not be hot enough to use the hood of your car to grill your burgers on Saturday, it will be plenty hot during the day. You can thank the Cleveland Indians, the Seattle Mariners and Baseball Night in America on Fox for pushing kickoff until after the late local news on the East Coast. In this case, I will gladly trade any heat-related illness for getting home early Sunday morning and sleeping late that day. Any East Coasters who want to see the game can always record it and watch it early the next morning since there are no NFL games that day.
Utah Coaching Staff
As always, we’ll kickoff our weekly previews with a look at the opposing coaching staff and special teams.
Let’s begin our look at the Utah coaching staff where we always do — at the top. The Utes are still led by Kyle Whittingham, even though there was lots of speculation that he could retire as last season ended.
But he ended the speculation in Jordan-like fashion, simply announcing “I’m back.” He did face multiple changes on his coaching staff, however. Longtime offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig stepped down in October, leading to the hiring of former New Mexico offensive coordinator Jason Beck. Beck brought new wide receivers coach Micah Simon with him from New Mexico and Mark Atuaia has signed on to coach the running back after spending the previous three seasons with Washington State.
The defensive side of the ball should look and feel familiar as Morgan Scalley is still the Utes’ defensive coordintor and the defensive position coaches are all still there from the last time UCLA played Utah back in 2023. Scalley’s defenses have always been ready to play and I don’t expect it to be any different on Saturday.
With both the Bruins and the Utes making big changes to the offensive side of the ball, this game could prove to be either a defensive struggle where the final score is very low if the offenses aren’t quite ready for prime time, or it could be a very high-scoring game if the defenses have a tough time adapting to unscouted looks that the new offenses are throwing at them.
Let’s look at the Ute special teams.
Utah Special Teams
From a fan’s perspective, one of the cooler things about the first game of the season is that the other team may not know who is going to be the starter in certain positions. Of course, that makes writing about the team a tad bit difficult, and that’s the case for the Ute special teams.
Kicker Cole Becker, punter Jack Bouwmeester and even long snapper JT Greep have all departed the program this year. That means there will be new starters across the board for Utah.
The punting seems locked in to Australian sophomore Orion Phillips who joins the program after spending last season at Missouri. He’s the only punter on the Utes’ roster.
But the kicking could get interesting. There are three kickers, any one of whom could see action on Saturday. Sophomore Joey Cheek was with the Utes last season, but he saw no action. Joining him will be sophomore transfer Robert Petrich, who was at San Diego Mesa College last season, and freshman Dillon Curtis. So, at least that might mean that Whittingham and staff could send out one or more guys to try a kick for the first time in a major college football game. Hopefully, it sees them choke when that happens, not that it will matter much. Since the Utes joined the Pac-12 in 2011, only one game was decided by three points or less. Eleven of the twelve games were won by at least seven points and five saw a margin of more than twenty points.
Utah has lost its top two punt returners from last season. Both Mycah Pittman, who entered the Transfer Portal, and Dorian Singer, who graduated, returned eight punts for 45 yards each. As a result, Rayshawn Glover is the top punt returner who is back for another season. Last year, Glover returned five punts for 10 yards while Jackson Bennee also returned a punt last year for 24 yards. Will these two be the first guys to return punts for the Utes this season? Maybe but, without a depth chart, it’s hard to say who will handle that.
The same goes for the team’s kick returners. The most likely kick returner is junior cornerback Smith Snowden who returned seven kickoffs last season for 187 yards, making him the Utes’ top kickoff returner in 2024. Snowden is the only returning player who returned any kicks for Utah last season, but he may be too valuable to the Utes to be returning kicks again this year. So, it’s very possible someone else will handle those duties. We’ll see on Saturday.
Go Bruins!!!
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