subject: Utah Utes - Urban Meyer Breaks the BCS [print this page] A lot of things have changed in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Bowl Championship Series over the last few years. With teams like Boise State and Texas Christian finally beginning to get their due as legitimate national title contenders, the major conferences with automatic BCS berths seem poised to lose their stranglehold on the championship title. To look at the true origins of the breakdown of that stranglehold, one need only go back to Urban Meyer's time as the coach of the Utah Utes. The Utes play in the Mountain West Conference, one of the smaller NCAA groupings that were not afforded the automatic berth provided to major conference teams when the BCS was first established. As a result, no team from a conference such as the MWC was invited to a BCS game - that is, until Urban Meyer arrived at the University of Utah.
Ready to go
Upon taking the job at Utah, Meyer had little to do to get his team ready to play. The Utes were an established team with a history of success. Over the last 118 years, the Utes have won twenty-four conference championships wherever they have been, and had compiled a 617-421 record overall. In addition, their postseason record was the best of any team with at least ten appearances: 12-3. Meyer knew that he was joining a program with the potential for great things, and immediately set out to provide his team with the motivation to reach that potential. In one of his first public statements, he let it be known that his team's goal would be to focus on playing hard in an up-tempo style, and ensure that their fans were given the show they deserved.
The wall comes down
Meyer's first campaign with the Utes demonstrated that his style of play would reap huge rewards for his team. After using Meyer's spread offense to win 10 of the 12 games they played and their conference crown, there was no doubt that the Utes were a real power. Their bowl game that year was a complete shutout of a quality Southern Miss. Team. Not content to rest on their laurels, the following year's team repeated as conference winners while establishing a new Utes' scoring record - all while going undefeated. The BCS was eventually forced to acknowledge the Utes' dominance, and gave them a slot in the Fiesta Bowl of 2005 against Pittsburgh. The Utes won that contest going away. Their season results earned them a number four ranking in the Associated Press's final season poll.
Though his tenure at the University of Utah was a mere two years, Urban Meyer had managed to break through the BCS wall that separated the mid-level conferences from the so-called majors. The BCS - and the rest of the college football world - at last realized that those major conferences were not the sole repository of quality football in the country. As for the Utes, they were provided another opportunity to show their mettle in a BCS match up when they faced the Crimson Tide of Alabama in 2009. The Utes soundly beat them as well.
