Utah State Aggies serve notice of another team in Utah

SALT LAKE CITY – We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to make this important public service announcement: There are actually three major college football teams in Utah, not two.

Sometimes it just takes a little (or possibly a gigantic) reminder.

Locked into a conference teetering on the brink, lodged in the northern reaches of the state, beset by small budget issues, Utah State has been overshadowed the past year – OK, the past three decades -- by Utah and BYU.

But Saturday afternoon the Aggies struck a blow for the little guys by nearly upsetting defending national champion Auburn on its home field. Two Auburn touchdowns in the final 3 ½ minutes turned a 10-point upset special into a 42-38 Tiger win.

It's hard to know how Utah State will do in the WAC this year, but it's safe to say it got the rest of the conference's attention. With Boise State moving to the Mountain West, the race should be infinitely more suspenseful. Since USU was picked to finish fifth in the conference coaches' poll, you have to ask: Don't those coaches watch game film?

Or did USU's performance have something to do with those 5-Hour Energy shots commercials that ran during the timeouts?

Whatever it was, the Aggies could have used another few minutes of vigor.

It should be noted here that USU didn't ever lie down. The Aggies played their ever-loving agricultural college hooves off. But what happened on Saturday is what often happens when small teams play big ones. As the game progresses, the team with less depth and size gets tired. So do the opponents, but they have more where that came from.

So the smaller team does the best it can for as long as it can. Unfortunately for USU, this time it was for 56 ½ of the required 60 minutes. Auburn pulled off a nifty onside kick and scored twice late to return from the dead.

This was as close to true glory as it has been in several decades for the Aggies. A win would have been considered among the biggest upsets in college football history. Most experts list games like USC over Notre Dame in 1964, Cal over Stanford in 1986 or Kansas State over Oklahoma in 2003 among the biggest upsets of all time. In 2007, tiny Appalachian State beat mighty Michigan.

But App-State was on its way to its third straight FCS (formerly I-AA) national championship and Michigan was on the way to a merely decent 9-4 season, after which it fired the coach.