Last year was the first season of the Pac-12, as the conference invited in a couple more teams to join the party. The number one reason far and away for expansion was football and the ability to have a conference championship game, but of course, Utah and Colorado didn’t just move their pigskin programs. The Utes’ football team nearly made the Pac-12 championship game last year while Colorado struggled mightily under a first year coach having to deal with a multitude of injuries on his roster, so one could surmise that it was a mixed bag for the expansion teams in the Pac-12 teams on the gridiron.
The Buffaloes were one of the few bright spots for the Pac-12 last season, providing the conference with its lone NCAA Tournament win.
With that criterion, you could say the same about last year’s basketball season, except flip the roles of the schools in question. Despite being picked to finish 10th (tied with Washington State) by the media in the preseason poll, the Buffaloes were an impressive 11-7 in the Pac-12 regular season and stunned most everyone by winning four games in four days to claim the Pac-12 Tournament and snatch up the league’s automatic bid to the Big Dance. On the other hand, Utah had a poor non-conference showing with blowout losses to the likes of Boise State, Fresno State and Cal State Fullerton. The Utes didn’t have much more success in the Pac-12 slate, finishing 3-15 in conference and coming in 11th place.
That said, it wouldn’t be fair to Utah to judge them for eternity based on last season’s performance. It was Larry Krystkowiak’s first season in Salt Lake City and the Utes were without their difference-maker on defense in David Foster (and they’ll continue to be without him this year, too). And with such a huge roster upheaval this year — only three guys on this year’s team played in a game for the Utes in 2011-12 and six transfers are eligible to suit up — who knows how much one can really expect of the 2012-13 version, though that backcourt should get a huge shot in the arm with three of those transfers in Glen Dean, Jarred DuBois and Aaron Dotson.
One thing is for sure, though: This year’s Utes will be more in line with Krystkowiak’s vision of what Utah basketball will be about under his watch. The Pac-12’s Coach K is a principled man who didn’t have a problem with booting Josh Watkins off the team last year even though he was the team’s leading scorer. He has had success at the college level, having led Montana to back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances and an upset of Nevada in the first round of the 2006 Big Dance. He has the credentials, the X’s and O’s, and the ability to get his players to bust their tails for him to return things to normal in Salt Lake City; it’s just going to take time.
Things are looking a lot brighter in Boulder, where Colorado again figures to be a top-half or top-third Pac-12 team thanks to guys like André Roberson and Spencer Dinwiddie and a top-25 recruiting class brought in by Tad Boyle, who has been so good in his first two years in Boulder that Buffs fans have starting using the hashtag “#rolltad”. While there certainly could have been sexier additions to the Pac from a basketball perspective, Colorado has stepped in just nicely and Utah could be in the mix in a couple of years, depending on how this huge batch of transfers pans out and how well Krystkowiak can recruit against the big boys.