Cam Rising has become “The Guy,” for the Utes. Formerly QB2, he’s now the starter. Whether he should have been the starter from the get-go, it’s a moot right now, as the University of Utah just needs to start winning games
No other second-string player presents the same curious optimism as the backup QB. In the unlikely event you notice that a wide receiver with the drops or a linebacker who keeps missing his gaps has been replaced with his backup, you are hardly ever going to feel excited about it.
Yet the second-string quarterback represents for fans a kind of undiscovered country of possibility. Stories like those of Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady dominate the imagination, and fans imagine the backup coming in and flashing new and exciting skills and transforming the football team.
College football is a game of stories—narratives that are as often built out of random twists of fate as they are legitimate trends over time for a player, coach, or program. Cam Rising is perfectly set up to tell such a legendary story, although Utah fans shouldn't be surprised if it has more twists and turns that it seems early on.
The first chapter is already written. Charlie Brewer left the game (and later the program) in a profound performance slump, thanks to his own struggles, as well as some serious problems among the offensive line. He closed out his game against the Aztecs completing barely 50% of his passes and with a stunningly bad ESPN QBR of 11.3. The score when he was pulled was an abysmal 24-10.
Rising came in and the game turned around, or so the story will go. The Utes went from 24-10 to 24-24, barely losing the game on a two-point conversion duel in triple overtime. Instead of a near pick-six and no scores, Rising threw three touchdowns and racked up an ESPN QBR of 82.7. A clutch performance that brought Utah back into the game, no doubt.
How much credit we give Rising for the clear gap in quarterback performance is more up in the air. A lot changed between the first half and the second, all of it in favor of the Utah offense.
1. The Utes were trailing big and the SDSU defensive approach changed. It's well-known that teams will soften up their defensive play-calling when they have a lead, looking to keep the ball in front of them and slow the pace of the game. They will also, often, take less risks on offense and slow down their scoring pace.
2. The Utes were underperforming and regressed up to their mean. If you're a Utah fan, and you watched the first half of that game, you weren't happy. You were probably saying things like “This is the worst they've ever played,” or “What kind of lies were they telling us in fall camp,” and you'd be right to note that the team was way underperforming all reasonable expectations. That can mean the team is worse than you thought—but it also almost always means that the team is going through a random cluster of bad events. Just like a good free-throw shooter can have a long run of misses, a good football team can have a long run of bad plays. When that run stops, the team will seem much better all of a sudden
So everything leading up to Rising's entry into the football game was set up to make him look good, to perform at a higher level than Brewer and start telling a story of the Savior QB2. Chapter 2 promises to invite us to double down on that narrative, telling ourselves the story of Rising's greatness, imagining Utah scoring points in bunches the rest of the way. That invitation comes in the form of an incredibly porous Washington State Defense, a stark contrast to San Diego State's top-25 defensive unit.
It's not that you won't see a transformed Utah offense on Saturday; you quite likely will. It's that you should bring a whole shakerful of salt to the table as you are evaluating whether or not everything is as rosy as it seems.
The Utes are heavily favored to win this matchup, although statistical models project the margin to be more likely to be under the aggressive -15 spread set by Vegas. Look for the team to score points in bunches and for fans to be surging with renewed confidence as they take on one of the two worst teams on their schedule this season.
The Rising Era has begun. What’s the start and the narrative going to be a few weeks from now…
Utah 38, WSU 24