Finally, a football game. After a low-tension dressing down in Provo, the Utes sleepwalked through a pair of casual victories against utterly over-matched opponents. Kyle Whittingham noted in a recent press conference that his team had played the fewest snaps of any PAC 12 opponent, and no doubt if you counted snaps played by first-string players, that difference is even more stark. So the Utes are fresh as they start this stretch with a tilt in the Coliseum, and fans have been swinging wildly from confident to nervous about this contest, as the Trojans have experienced some wild ups and downs through three games.

The Roller Coaster

The ride got off to an exciting start when highly touted QB JT Daniels lost his season to a knee injury in the Trojan's opening contest against a much improved Fresno State team. Utah fans were certain the team's offense would fall apart and USC would be a mess by the time week 4 rolled around.

The bottom dropped out of that confidence the very next week, as a ranked Stanford team rolled into LA and got rolled over by an apparently unstoppable USC offense. Backup Keedon Slovis racked up over 11 yards per attempt on 85% completions with three touchdowns and no interceptions. Surely this was the second coming of Matt Leinart, and the Trojans would be favored against the Utes on the road.

Another week is in the books and the switch has flipped once more, thanks to USC's struggles at BYU, a team Utah beat handily in the same stadium. Instead of slicing and dicing BYU's secondary, Slovis threw three interceptions and struggled with efficiency (and it didn't hurt that Stanford got walloped by UCF). Ute fans watched Utah's game against that team and are again confident they should be able to handle the Trojans just as easily as they did the Cougars.

As usual, the answer to the question "will we get the good Trojans or the bad Trojans" is: yes.

It's tempting to forget what you thought you knew about a team because of new information. The instinct is to replace your mental impression of USC preseason with what you saw against Stanford, and replace THAT with the USC you saw on Saturday night in Provo. The reality is that those impressions should only majorly shift your perception if they simply do not fit in the picture at all.

That's not the case here. We expected a supremely talented, poorly coached, inconsistent USC team that could leverage their extraordinary athletes to play at a top 25 level, or make so many mistakes that their athleticism wouldn't be able to bail them out. That's exactly what we've gotten so far, and expectations should not have moved much for the Trojans.

The good news for the Utes is that even at their best, Utah is a better team. A decade of superior coaching and culture has created a squad of more disciplined, better prepared, and more synergized players. USC still has the fastest, biggest, strongest players on the planet, and they will find ways to score touchdowns- but Utah should win this game, no matter which USC team shows up.

Utah 33, USC 28