Most schools hope to escape college football’s roiling, unpredictable offseason with one capable quarterback. Utah emerged from the fray with two.
Starter Devon Dampier announced his return for the 2026 season on Tuesday, even though Dampier’s former head coach and offensive coordinator are now employed somewhere in the Upper Midwest. (Or so we’ve heard.)
Dampier joins backup Byrd Ficklin, whose return was confirmed last month, to give the Utes a double-dose of playmaking prowess that will be the envy of many in the Big 12 and position Utah to take the final, short step into the conference championship game.
That’s right: short step.
Technically, Utah (11-2) finished one game behind Texas Tech and BYU in the conference race in 2025, with head-to-head losses to both, and was blocked from playing for the championship.
We saw it differently. We saw the Utes finish three plays away from a berth in Arlington:
— One came in the conference opener against Texas Tech.
Late in the first quarter, the Utes appeared to connect on a 69-yard touchdown pass from Dampier to Jackson Bennee that would have tied the score (7-7). But an ineligible-player-downfield penalty (on tackle Spencer Fano) nullified the touchdown and, in our view, completely changed the game. The Utes fumbled a few plays later, never regained momentum and faded in the fourth quarter.
— Two plays came in the Holy War.
It was clear from the start that touchdowns would be few and every point critical. But on two occasions, Whittingham eschewed short field goals in favor of fourth-down conversion attempts. Both were stuffed by the Cougars: the first at BYU’s 12-yard line; the second at the 8. Utah had other failures on fourth downs, but those were most egregious given the likelihood of converting the field goals. And those 6 points left on the field proved massive in BYU’s 24-21 victory.
If there’s no touchdown-nullifying penalty in the showdown with Texas Tech, or if Whittingham opts for two field goals against BYU, the Utes could very well have played for the Big 12 title.
After all, they won the other seven Big 12 games, most of them handily.
That bodes well for 2026 despite the obvious concerns stemming from Whittingham’s departure to Michigan, his subsequent raid of the coaching staff and Utah’s transition to the Morgan Scalley era.
Anytime a rookie head coach takes charge, there are risks. But Scalley has made shrewd moves with his staffing decisions, particularly at offensive coordinator. Kevin McGiven’s well-tested scheme is comparable enough to the system Utah used in 2025 under Jason Beck that any learning curve for Dampier and Ficklin should be limited.
If the Utes are healthy — and we expect that scale to continue rebalancing after the injury-ravaged 2023-24 seasons — then hot pursuit of the conference title should follow.
So much of the Big 12’s competitive landscape plays out on the margins, with four or five plays across two or three games separating contenders from pretenders.
(Sure, Texas Tech steamrolled to the No. 1 seed in the fall, but BYU needed three victories by 3 points, or overtime, to grab the second berth in the conference championship.)
The schedule is favorable, as well. The Utes should handle Idaho and Utah State with ease and manage their business against Arkansas, which undoubtedly will have one eye on its SEC opener the following week, against Georgia.
Within conference play, the Utes face BYU and Houston at home, miss Arizona State and Texas Tech and have just one road game of obvious, high-level concern: Arizona. (Yes, they visit Iowa State, but the Cyclones are an unknown commodity now that coach Matt Campbell has jumped to Penn State.)
As we see the Big 12 terrain, the Utes could not have asked for more advantageous circumstances in the post-Whittingham era.
They were bound to lose players to the transfer portal and coaches to the carousel, but on both fronts, the damage has been mitigated.
The schedule is so favorable, Scalley might as well have crafted it himself.
And the competition is retrenching.
Iowa State lost Campbell. Arizona State lost quarterback Sam Leavitt, and BYU lost ace defensive coordinator Jay Hill to Michigan. (Whittingham did the Utes a favor in that regard.)
Texas Tech again looks formidable — and has a pillowy soft schedule — but the Red Raiders cannot occupy both spots in the Big 12 championship.
The other is there for the taking for a team that was just a few plays away in 2025.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.