The Mountain "Pest" Conference

Living in Utah has its advantages and disadvantages. Utah has mountains and snow, and great micro-brewed beers. The economy is not totally in the crapper, and they do have a NBA team.

There are many disadvantages though, and most of it can be chalked up to the Mormon Church and its reaches into State Government out here. Most of the gripes are related to alcohol and tobacco taxes and restrictions, as well as the whole state basically shutting down on Sunday’s.

But hands down the biggest downer about living out here is the college football factor.

Growing up in Florida blessed me with the opportunity to watch and attend college football games all over the southeast.

I’ve been lucky enough to watch games at the Swamp in Gainesville, at Doak Campbell in Tallahassee, at the Orange Bowl in Miami, at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando and on one fall weekend my brother and I attended a game at Neyland Stadium in Tennessee with our Uncle.

I don’t use the word hate lightly, but I hate the Tennessee Volunteers. Yet the game day atmosphere in Knoxville is electric. The stadium holds over 100,000 people and sits right next to the Tennessee River. The campus comes alive, with scores of people "Sailgating" on boats on the river to people tailgating all over the surrounding areas of the stadium.

Neyland Stadium with the Tennessee River by it




FSU is right behind Tennessee in my personal hate club, and yet going to one of their home games is an absolute blast. I’ve been to games at Doak as both a child as well as a young adult who tried to commit alcohol poisoning on himself (almost succeeded), and had a great time both ways.

The craziness starts hours before kickoff and reaches a fervor when Chief Osceola throws his flaming spear into midfield right before the start of the game. (It’s no coincidence that Flaming and FSU go so well together)

Doak holds a fat amount of people, and in my opinion, narrowly edges UCF and the Citrus Bowl for the best looking girls at the games. Just be careful about sitting too close to the FSU wide receivers, they will either rob you or throw a chair at your face.

The Swamp in Gainesville is a beautiful stadium, located in the heart of the campus of the University of Florida. Yes I am biased to it, because I’m a huge Gators honk, but the stadium is surrounded by serene lakes, historic brick buildings and towering trees, that give it an intimate setting.

The fans are loud and passionate and have a great knowledge of the game. There are numerous places to tailgate, and the cops are not pricks, they let people enjoy themselves, which as an 18-20 year old that would drink it up, was greatly appreciated at the time.

The stadium itself is huge, with seating just over 90,000. It is called The Swamp because according to then Coach Steve Spurrier, "a swamp is where Gators live. We feel comfortable there, but we hope our opponents feel tentative. A swamp is hot and sticky and can be dangerous. Only Gators get out alive."


Truer words have never been spoken.








All of these stadiums have one common factor; 75,000+ fans that come in after tailgating for at least 4 hours, and are passionate and knowledgeable. Most of these fans expect National Championships, and they are more than vocal about it once the game starts.

But in Utah, they have one decent stadium setting at the University of Utah, and one abomination of a college football atmosphere down in BYU.

Both places have very little areas for tailgating, and in BYU, tailgating, and I use that term very loosely, consists of eating jello and drinking caffeine free soda. I wish I was making this up.

You can thank the Mormon Church out here for that one, as BYU is a no-tolerance dry campus, and they make all their students sign an honor code that states they won’t drink alcohol, smoke or basically have a normal college lifestyle during their four years there.

If you break any of those rules, you will get kicked out of school. And because most of these kids are straight up lames, they will drop a dime on you and snitch you out to school authorities. So this makes a tame crowd of 60,000 people, even more pacified compared to SEC and ACC fans.

Utah’s stadium is located at the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, which is cool. What is not cool is the lack of areas to tailgate and drink alcohol, as well as the relative puny seating capacities of roughly 50,000 or so.



Utah's Rice Eccles Stadium



Recently Utah and the Mountain West Conference have been making a fuss about being included in the BCS Bowl System. They claim that they are an equal to the SEC and ACC, which is a total farce.

If Utah had been in the SEC last year they would have been a six loss team instead of undefeated. The Ute’s narrowly beat Oregon State and TCU, and both of those games were at home.

Imagine what would happen if they had to face LSU, Kentucky, Alabama and Tennessee on the road, coupled with home games against Florida, Georgia, Ole Miss and Auburn; I see at least 6 losses there easily.

Instead Utah and BYU claim that because they can beat teams like Wyoming, San Diego State and Colorado State that they are just as good as Florida or Florida State.

Please, get real Utah and BYU.

You go on the road and play these joke teams like New Mexico and UNLV, where there might be 15,000 fans and you think that is equal to Florida going into Tennessee with 100,000 or Florida State going to Virginia Tech with 70,000 screaming, passionate fans.

And I haven’t even mentioned the disparity in talent or depth. Utah is good, but not great. They may have a handful of athletes, but the Florida and Florida State walk-ons and practice team players would beat the BYU and Utah starters most years.

Utah’s past season of success can be attributed to Urban Meyer’s last recruiting class while he was at Utah. Almost every key contributor to the Ute’s 2008 team was a Meyer recruit. And it took them all four years to get it to come together and go undefeated against an inferior schedule.

They also caught a break playing against Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. Not taking anything away from the win, because it was a great victory for Utah, but they did play a Bama team that was missing its best player in left tackle Andre Smith, who wound up being the 6th pick in this year’s NFL draft.

The Tide could have cared less to be there against Utah, because of the loss in the SEC Championship against Florida a month before.

Alabama had been undefeated all year and ranked number one for half the season, and it all slipped right through their fingers when the Gators beat them in the last game of the regular season.

So Utah, BYU and TCU, need to temper their expectations and face the reality that playing against inferior opponents in non-hostile environments and racking up a 10 win season because of it, does not make you an equal to SEC and ACC teams.

If they are stuck on getting to the BCS title games, here’s a fun suggestion. Transfer into the Pac-10 or Big 12 conferences.

Oh wait BYU had the chance to join the Pac-10 in the 1970’s, and passed because, you won’t believe it, they did not want their athletic teams playing on Sunday’s. So BYU you are not allowed to complain ever again, you made your bed, now lie in it.

Utah, I believe should try to transfer into the Big 12 conference. If Colorado can be in the conference so can Utah.

But I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon because Utah is tangled up in a bad contract with the Mountain West, and it has to with some obscure cable channel called The Mountain that maybe 38 people watch when it’s not football season.

So until then, enjoy the dominance of SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Big 10 teams winning national championships, and look forward to being relevant nationally every four years or so Mountain West fans.