BOULDER, Colo. - Utah walked out of Folsom Field with a 27-24 win and a 6-0 record, but Morgan Scalley didn’t spend much time admiring the escape. His message after the Utes’ survival act was direct: the result was good, the performance was not.
“Looking at this game, I think you look at really all metrics that matter, and I don’t know that we should have won this game,” Scalley said. “Outside of the score.”
“You won’t win many games doing what we did.”
That blunt verdict followed a night in which Utah let a 13-0 halftime lead disappear, fell behind 17-13 and then needed a pair of second-half touchdown connections from Devon Dampier to Braden Pegan to pull it back together. James Chenault Jr.’s fourth-quarter interception and Creed Whittemore’s difficult grabs helped swing it back Utah’s way.
Scalley made it clear he valued the response. He also made it clear the Utes can’t keep living this way.
The numbers backed up the mess. Utah finished with 409 yards and held the ball for 37 minutes, yet converted only three of six red-zone chances into touchdowns. Dampier threw two interceptions, including one after Utah had driven all the way to Colorado’s 1-yard line.
“I think you saw a rhythm, but then ultimately we didn’t finish,” Scalley said. “It’s finishing in the red zone with touchdowns.”
Colorado’s front caused plenty of the trouble. The Buffs logged nine tackles for loss and three sacks, repeatedly throwing Utah off schedule and making it hard to build any kind of steady rhythm.
Scalley said he expected that kind of challenge from an active defensive front that brought pressure all night. He said any deeper review of Utah’s offensive line would come after film study.
When asked whether the second-half issues traced back to playcalling, Scalley stood up for offensive coordinator Kevin McGiven and shifted the focus to execution.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t say I would question the playcalling there in the second half. Yeah, there’s some execution stuff that needed to happen, whether we didn’t send guys in motion when we needed to.
There are a couple of things there, a couple of missed IDs in terms of what Devon was looking for. But ultimately, it falls back on us, and we’ve got to be able to coach him better.”
He also explained why Utah kept taking shots downfield. Colorado was loading up to stop the run, which opened the door for the receivers.
“If we feel that the box is stacked … you have to be able to go to your wide receivers,” he said.
Utah also had problems on the other side of the ball after halftime. The Utes held Colorado to 70 first-half yards, then gave up 324 in the final two quarters.
The Buffs scored on their first three possessions of the third quarter, turning a two-score deficit into a four-point lead. That second-half burst included a 68-yard touchdown catch by JaQuail Smith and a late 48-yard completion to DeAndre Moore Jr.
Scalley pointed to communication and coverage discipline as the issues.
“There were too many times today where we came off coverage, and then miscommunication on combos, stuff like that,” he said. “So we have to be cleaner in the back end.”
He rejected the idea that Colorado quarterback Isaac Wilson’s familiarity with Utah’s defense was the reason for the breakdowns. In Scalley’s view, the problem was that Utah did not consistently execute the coverage it knew Colorado would see.
The final minutes brought another chance for the Utes to put the game away cleanly, and another sequence that didn’t go smoothly. After recovering Colorado’s onside kick with 1:20 left, Utah gained two yards, lost four and threw incomplete before punting. The drive lasted just 24 seconds, leaving Colorado one more shot.
Dampier owned the mistake on the incompletion.
“I was told to keep that ball if I didn’t think I could complete the ball, and that’s totally on me,” he said. “I take full accountability of that.
I got great coaches. They very much prepared me for that moment, so I just got to make it happen.”
Scalley didn’t pin it on the quarterback alone.
“If it’s not clean, you’ve got to basically kill it. You’ve got to go down,” he said.
“But that’s on us. We’ve not coached that well enough, obviously.”
Still, the Utes found enough answers to survive. Whittemore converted third-and-10 with a 43-yard catch on the go-ahead touchdown drive.
After Chenault’s interception and 30-yard return, Whittemore came down with a 25-yard reception on second-and-19 to set up Pegan’s second touchdown. Brock Fonoimoana’s onside-kick recovery and Dillon Curtis’ two made field goals also mattered.
For Scalley, the biggest positive was the way his team kept its composure when the game turned sideways.
“We’ve got a really, really good group that just doesn’t go quiet,” he said. “It’s a group that says, ‘Let’s keep talking, let’s keep connecting’ and that’s huge.”
Pegan called the finish “a little bit of a wake-up call,” a reminder of how much Utah still has to clean up.
Scalley agreed with that sentiment without softening his criticism.
“It’s not always pretty, and this was definitely not pretty and not clean,” he said. “But we did enough.”
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