Brooks: Rivalry Game Or Whatever, Buffs Need To Win It

BOULDER – Back in the day, which has become slang for just about any long ago time frame that can be remembered without great difficulty, Colorado and Utah were genuine football rivals. They met for the first time in 1903 and played with great regularity through 1962.

Then they took a little break – try nearly five decades.

When the pair of Rocky Mountain schools became the newest Pac-12 Conference members four football seasons ago (2011), the league had visions of the Buffaloes and Utes rekindling that former fierce rivalry.

The Pac-12, or someone of authority in a good position to float the idea, even suggested a catchy (or maybe not) label for the series’ rebirth: Rumble in the Rockies.

I guess it’s been a rumble. The teams’ three meetings as Pac-12 members have been close anyway, with none won by more than a touchdown. On Black Friday 2011 in Salt Lake City, CU won that first meeting since 1962, surviving two missed Utah field goals – the last with 3 seconds to play – and prevailed 17-14.

But for the Buffs, that day’s storyline wasn’t so much about a rivalry being reborn as it was about them ending a 24-game out-of-state road losing streak. It was CU’s first win on the road since the 2007 season at Texas Tech.

Jon Embree, ending his first and next-to-last season as the Buffs’ head coach, was asked afterward if the game and setting in Utah’s Rice-Eccles Stadium felt like a rivalry. Answered Embree:  “It feels like a win. (The road losing streak) is finally over . . . it’ll take time, but we keep having games like this, it’ll become a rivalry. I’m sure Kyle (Whittingham, Utah coach) feels the same way.”

THE LOSS WAS COSTLY for the Utes. Had they won, they would have played in the Pac-12 championship game. But they dropped to 4-5 (7-5 overall) and three seasons later are still chasing a .500 Pac-12 finish.

Meanwhile, the Buffs are still chasing everyone else in the Pac-12. Embree’s first CU team finished 2-7 in the conference and 3-10 overall. But 2012 would only get worse, with a one-win season (1-11 overall, 1-8 Pac-12) and what school officials saw as a disheveled, disintegrating program leading to Embree’s firing.

Utah defeated CU 42-35 in Boulder in Embree’s final season, then won 24-17 in Salt Lake City last season in Mike MacIntyre’s first season as CU’s coach. Saturday’s Game 4 Saturday at Folsom Field (11 a.m., Pac-12 Networks) finds the Buffs trying to close out their fourth year in the Pac-12 with this season’s first conference win.

The series with CU is Utah’s longest against a Pac-12 team and the Utes’ fifth longest against any opponent. It’s CU’s eighth longest against any opponent, and the Buffs lead it 31-26-3 – but they unquestionably have ground to make up in their new conference.

To this point, CU’s four-year Pac-12 record is 4-31 (2-7, 1-8, 1-8, 0-8), Utah’s is 13-22 (4-5, 3-6, 2-7, 4-4). The Utes’ best conference finish (4-5) came in the only season they lost to the Buffs (2011). And unlike CU, Utah has kept the same coach – Whittingham – it had when it entered the Pac-12. He’s in his 11th season as the head coach in SLC, with a respectable 83-43 record and a remarkable 7-1 postseason record – although the Utes’ last bowl trip was in 2011.

The Buffs are looking for that kind of stability and oh-so-much more under MacIntyre, who said Tuesday that from his perspective at San Jose State in 2011 Utah was much better equipped to enter the Pac-12 than CU.

“They’ve had a good program for a while . . . they’ve had tremendous stability there,” MacIntyre said. “They’ve built new facilities there, they have a program that I would say is a top-BCS, Top 25, program for a while now. To me, they are not even close to what we are when it comes to rebuilding or anything like that.

“I think they were established and ready to go (upon entering the Pac-12). They’ve had good stability, and I know they were down a little bit last year compared to what they have been, but I think they are a very good football team with a lot of stability in their program, and their facilities, and their support. I think they are ahead of where we were when we jumped in the Pac-12, I think everybody would agree with that.

“Of course, I wasn’t here when we jumped in the Pac-12, but just looking from the outside in. We played Utah when I was at San Jose State, and they were really, really good. And they have a really good football team now.”

THE BEST THAT MACINTYRE can say in the final month of his second season is that he’s got an improved team and better facilities are on the way. If the timing syncs up planned, winning football and the physical upgrade in and around Folsom will touch down at the same time – the fall of 2015.

But the here and now is on the minds of MacIntyre and his team, which would love to launch into the 2015 off-season with a win. That it would be a Pac-12 is of some significance, simply because finishing winless in conference play hasn’t been done at CU in, oh, about a hundred years (0-5 in 1915 in the Rocky Mountain Conference).

That’s somewhere way, way down Saturday’s list of reasons to succeed, said MacIntyre: “No, we just want to go win the football game.”

His weekly goal has been to go 1-0 and count the final numbers two days after Thanksgiving. While the tally sheet won’t be pretty either way – the Buffs are 2-9 overall, 0-8 in conference – MacIntyre contends that “week-in-week-out, we’ve played better in the Pac-12 this year than we did last year, and we got one Pac-12 win last year.

“This year, I definitely think we should have had four or five (conference wins), and we didn’t. So, I think it will eventually come, there’s no doubt about it. We want to win every game we play, but we definitely want to win this one.”

And, yes, it just might be a rivalry game, said safety Terrel Smith, one of 20 seniors who will make their final Folsom appearance on Saturday. “I do think that it is carrying over to a rivalry game,” he said before stumbling briefly on the renewed series’ label. “What’s it called? The Rocky Mountain Showdown?”

No, that’s that other rivalry, the in-state one.

Graciously corrected, Smith continued: “Oh, yeah, it’s the ‘Rumble in the Rockies.’ It is having that rivalry aspect to it. We’ve been close to them pretty much every year. It’s been back and forth with Utah, so we do approach it as a rivalry game. They’re a great team.”

Rivalry game or whatever you prefer to call it, the Buffs need to win it. They’ve been close for most of the Pac-12 season, but they’ve progressed to the point where coming close is a far cry from they want to be. Saturday’s final-game mantra: The end is the beginning.

Contact: BG.Brooks@Colorado.EDU