This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
By now, it's clear that this Utah team will be much better and much more competitive than last season's 6-25 edition.
Still, the Utes are figuring out how to win games against quality competition.
Saturday night is a shining example.
Utah could've - and maybe even should've - beaten BYU at the Marriott Center. But the Utes came up short because of a seven minute stretch where they went cold from the field at the absolute wrong time.
Utah scored just one field goal in that time span. More detrimental, the Utes took bad shots at inopportune times. In short, they put themselves in position to pull of a huge victory. But they didn't close it out.
"That's something that we're going to have to take, think about and get better at," Utah guard Glen Dean said. "We didn't do what we had to."
The shot selection went awry at the wrong time. There were turnovers, missed free-throws and missed chances to grab big rebounds. On the other end, BYU players were left wide open and people like Matt Carlino made Utah pay dearly.
But, Utah is still 6-3 on the season, and still miles ahead of where it was a season ago.
But Ute fans probably can't help but to wonder what may have been.
Tony Jones