Utah won this game twice. Once in the first five minutes, when the Utes raced to a 14-0 lead that BYU spent the rest of the first half clawing back. And once in the last five, when Bear Bachmeier threw the ball to the wrong team in the red zone, got it back, and threw it to the wrong team again with two seconds on the clock. The second one is the story.
BYU out-gained Utah on Saturday. BYU held the ball longer. By the raw measures that usually decide football games, BYU was the better team at Rice-Eccles Stadium. BYU still lost by eight, because Bachmeier threw four interceptions, two of them in the stretch where the Holy War and BYU's entire playoff case were still alive. You don't get to point at the yardage total after that. A quarterback who hands his opponent the ball four times doesn't get credit for the yards his offense picked up in between.
This game was closer than 28-20 looked. Utah nearly blew a two-score lead before halftime and needed a second-half surge to pull away. BYU led at the break. None of that changes what happened when the margin was thinnest: Bachmeier had the ball with a chance to tie it and threw it to Utah instead, then got one more chance in the final seconds and did it again. A team that keeps finding ways to lose the moments that decide the game has a quarterback problem.
Give Utah's defense its due. The second half belonged to them. BYU didn't score again after halftime, and a defense that shuts down a team averaging that kind of offense for an entire half is doing something real. Devon Dampier had the better day by any measure, with a touchdown throw and a touchdown run. That's Utah's story.
Nobody in Provo wants to tell the story of Utah's new head coach, Morgan Scalley, who inherited the job after Kyle Whittingham left for Michigan and is 9-0 in his first season running the show. Whittingham didn't want to go. He made that clear through his own representatives before he ever took the Michigan job, and Michigan is 4-3 right now while the program he built keeps winning without him. Utah fans spent the offseason panicking about losing the only coach the program had known for two decades. The guy who replaced him just beat BYU for the first time since Whittingham's teams lost three straight in this series, and he did it with Whittingham's own former starters playing for someone else.
BYU's three-game win streak in this rivalry is over. It ended because the quarterback who needed to outplay Utah's in the biggest moments played worse instead. A team that outgains its rival and still loses by eight gave the game away, four times, in the exact spots where giving it away costs the most.
