Utes proud of win streak

Perhaps sometime just before Halloween in 2007, the Utah football team will make sports history. That's about the time the Utes could break college football's record for consecutive games won, set by Oklahoma a half a century ago.

Of course the chances of that happening are somewhere between impossible and none. It isn't likely to happen.

Hundreds of teams have played thousands of football games for more than 135 years and no major college football team has really come close to the mark of 47 straight victories set by Bud Wilkinson's Sooners between 1953 and 1957, especially over the last 50 years.

The University of Washington won 39 straight just before World War I and Yale put together a pair of 37-game streaks back in the 19th Century. The only modern team to approach Oklahoma's record was Miami, which saw its 34-game win streak broken on a controversial call in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl loss to Ohio State.

For now, the Utah football team is happy with its 18-game winning streak, which started late in the 2003 season and the Utes will try to keep it going one week at a time.

Utah coach Kyle Whittingham, who expects to win every game his team plays, just laughed when asked about Oklahoma's streak and said it "will never be broken."

The Ute streak is already the longest in school history, bettering the 16-game winning streak by Ike Armstrong's teams from 1928-30, thanks to the two wins already this season over Arizona and Utah State.

It also surpassed BYU's 17-game winning streak in the early 1980s and is now the second-longest streak in the state's history, behind BYU's 25-game streak that started in 1983 and was broken by UCLA in 1985.

The Utah streak, second-longest in the nation behind USC's 23-game string, will be in jeopardy this week when the Utes play a "short-week" game against TCU in Fort Worth.

It will be the Utes' first trip to Texas since experiencing one of their only two losses over the past two-plus seasons. Since losing to Texas A&M in the second game of the 2003 season, the Utes have gone 23-1, the lone loss coming to New Mexico in October of '03.

While streaks are fun for the fans and media to talk about, the Utes are predictably sticking to the old one-game-at-a-time mantra, like everyone in sports does these days. Still, the Ute coaches and players have a sense of pride about their winning streak.

"It's an accomplishment and a lot of these guys on the team have been a part of all of them," Whittingham said. "It's great for the guys and definitely a very positive thing."