Utah fans have taken no small degree of delight in BYU's anemic offense this season. But they have a genuine reason to root for that to continue on Saturday.

Well, a second reason in addition to just wanting to see the Cougars lose.

KJZZ-Ch. 14 has a Mountain West Conference doubleheader scheduled. At 1 p.m., it's Air Force at BYU in the ESPN-plus game of the week.

That's not a locally produced telecast; it's ESPN's syndicated package that's sold to different stations in different MWC cities.

Immediately following is Utah at Colorado State, a game that will be produced by the folks at KJZZ. And, if they're lucky, the BYU-AFA game will be over before the Utah-CSU game kicks off shortly after 4:30 p.m.

Over the years, it hasn't been unusual for BYU games to run longer than 3 1/2 hours. Of course, those games featured a BYU team with a high-scoring passing offense, which we have yet to see this season.

Plus, games involving Air Force and its ground game tend to go more quickly, so here's betting there's no overlap on Saturday afternoon.

Now, certainly, the folks at Ch. 14 would rather have a good, long game than a bad, short game. And, despite the fact that KJZZ is the home of the Utes, Ch. 14 isn't rooting against the Cougars. If BYU fares as poorly against the Falcons as they did last year, ratings will plummet as the game goes on.

As for the Ute fans, if the BYU game does pre-empt the beginning of the Utah game, there might be a few complaints. Unless, of course, BYU is losing. Judging by my e-mail, there are a lot of Utah fans out there who would rather watch the Cougars lose than watch the Utes win.

REPEATS: A couple of weeks ago, the folks at KSL-Ch. 5 were making much of the fact that "SportsBeat" was going to air outtakes from BYU football coach Gary Crowton's television commercials. There were even comments made to the effect that this was the only place to see them.

What they failed to mention was that "Cougar Diary" on KTVX-Ch. 4 had already done an extended segment using many (maybe most) of the exact same clips.

SPEAKING OF CROWTON: Those ad spots, which feature the Cougar coach doing everything from cooking to weathercasting to home repair, are actually quite clever and amusing.

Although I'm hearing from BYU fans who find them a lot less amusing after the Stanford loss than they did before. Go figure.

But those commercials are one of the few times in his two-plus seasons at BYU that we've actually seen Crowton turn on any kind of charm on TV. As I've written before, good TV skills don't make you a good coach and bad TV skills don't make you a bad coach.

However, it's also true that TV viewers and fans are more likely to be forgiving of bad TV skills when you're winning . . .

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com