Utah got beat last week. There's no sense in making excuses. Yet Utah's performance metrics barely budged. They are ranked 11th in SP+, 9th in FPI, and are still projected to beat more than 100 teams by a touchdown or more on a neutral field.

So what's in a loss? Why is Utah ranked ahead of 23 teams with fewer of them? Why am I joining more or less every advanced metric system and Las Vegas oddsmakers in picking Utah to (spoiler alert) win this game against USC?

The answer is that half the teams that play each week are guaranteed a loss. What determines how we predict the future is where you lost, who to, and how.

Utah's losses are both on the road. The fan instinct is to wave this factor away, but it really is worth about a touchdown for the home team. If you think about the Gators and Bruins starting up 7, the final scores seem quite in line with the Utah team we expect.

The losses came against two good teams. Florida and UCLA aren't great, but football is a wildly chaotic game, where final scores are, as often as not, two or more touchdowns off from the best predictions. A few bad bounces of the ball, missed assignments on just the wrong play, a bad playcall, or a bad snap can be more than enough to swing the score in the wrong direction.

The losses had all the markers of a top tier team getting beat by a team closer to the middle. We look for opponents making fewer mistakes than expected, a surprising number of explosive plays from the lesser team, the better team's mistakes happening at critical, high leverage moments (4th down, red zone, late clock), and overall efficiency numbers that don't match the score. The stat sheets of Utah's losses are stuffed with those indicators.

That doesn't mean the losses don't count, or that the wins weren't earned. You've got to play the game on the field, not the spreadsheet, and Utah's players and coaches made critical errors in critical moments. But that's why, despite the losses and all the USC hype, Utah still looks like the better team on Saturday.

This game pencils out very similarly to the UCLA prediction. We've got two high octane offenses and defenses with flaws those offenses are well suited to exploit. Points shouldn't be hard to come by, and the win is going to go to the team doesn't have unforced errors, and the defense that disrupts two or three drives with stellar havoc plays. The Utes get the nod at home.

Utah 41, USC 38