Although a whole new bunch of players and coaches are wearing Utah red this season, these Utes still can put on a phenomenal postseason show. In what should stand as the most stunning performance of this bowl season, the Utes (7-5) earned their fifth consecutive bowl victory by drubbing No. 24 Georgia Tech 38-10 in the 2004 Emerald Bowl.
The Utah victory featured an offensive performance more than worthy of former coach Urban Meyer's 12-0 team that ran through the Bowl Championship Series in 2004. Travis LaTendresse caught 16 passes for 214 yards and four touchdowns, and Brett Ratliff passed for 381 yards as the Utes rolled up 550 total yards. Quinton Ganther ran for 120 yards and added a 41-yard TD romp in the fourth quarter that gave the Utes their final score.
First-year head coach Kyle Whittingham, Meyer's defensive coordinator last season, won his bowl debut in style.
"That was a quality football team we beat out there," said Whittingham. The only trouble was, the Utes were so dominant in the second half that they made the favored Yellow Jackets (7-5) look like just another Pittsburgh, last season's Fiesta Bowl opponent. Ratliff, who went 30-of-41, and LaTendresse, the game's offensive MVP, both set Utah bowl records with a superb afternoon of pitch-and-catch against the Yellow Jackets' bewildered secondary.
Each of LaTendresse's four TD catches of 14, 23, 25 and 16 yards came on simple post patterns down the middle.
Reggie Ball passed for 258 yards for Georgia Tech, which seemed disappointed to be so far from Atlanta for the postseason and it showed. The Yellow Jackets' vaunted defense, ranked among the nation's leaders entering the game, was shredded and stomped by a backup quarterback and his speedy receivers for its season-high in yards allowed.
Cornerback Eric Weddle, the Mountain West Conference's top defensive player and the Emerald Bowl's defensive MVP, did a bit of everything for the Utes - running the ball, engineering a fake field goal as a holder, even throwing a terrible interception.
But Weddle was most valuable in his day job, limiting star Georgia Tech receiver Calvin Johnson to two catches for 19 yards.
Despite the injury absences of quarterback Brian Johnson and top receiver John Madsen, the Utah offense was nearly flawless. Ratliff, the backup who led the Utes' overtime win over archrival BYU, made another case for a lively quarterback competition with Johnson and Oklahoma transfer Tommy Grady in spring ball.
Brian Hernandez, a junior who began his college career at Georgia Tech in 2002, added eight catches for 75 yards for Utah. The game essentially was decided early in the fourth quarter, and hundreds of fans from the pro-Utah crowd rushed the field afterward, lifting Ratliff and LaTendresse on their shoulders.
Utah opened the game with a drive befitting the nation's 12th-best offense, moving 76 yards in six plays capped by LaTendresse's 14-yard scoring grab. A similar drive later in the quarter ended with his TD catch between Georgia Tech defenders, and the Utes went up 20-0 on LaTendresse's third catch down the middle early in the second quarter.
Ball threw two interceptions in the first half but one play after Shaun Harper's pick, the Utes got greedy with a 20-point lead.
Weddle, who occasionally runs the ball on direct snaps for Utah's offense, threw a terrible long pass into triple coverage, and Dennis Davis intercepted.
Georgia Tech immediately drove for its first touchdown, with Ball hitting tight end George Cooper for a 31-yard score. The Utah offense struggled through the rest of the half, and the Yellow Jackets got within 20-10 with a 65-yard pass to Damarius Bilbo and a field goal shortly before halftime.
Georgia Tech never scored again. Utah's offense, meanwhile, was far from finished.
Utah faked a field goal inside the Georgia Tech 15 early in the second half, with Weddle running for a first down as the holder - but Ratliff threw an end-zone interception on the next play.
The Utes still put it out of reach with a 73-yard scoring drive early in the fourth quarter, with LaTendresse catching his fourth TD pass over the middle and running headfirst into a picture of Willie Mays on the left-field wall at SBC Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. Utah made it 31-10 with a 2-point conversion, with Ratliff throwing to LaTendresse, of course. The Utes final score came on a 41-yard run to the goal line by Ganther.
"Georgia Tech didn't take us seriously. I don't think they did. They learned a lesson today," said Utah center Jesse Boone.
"We had great defense, and they weren't ready for our offense," Ratliff summarized. "We came to play."
There was plenty of motivation for the Utes to do so after a challenging season. A three-game skid in the middle of the season doomed Utah's hopes of a third consecutive Mountain West Conference title.
"At the beginning of the season we were supposed to be conference champs and at the end of the season we were not supposed to be anything," said Steve Fifita, last year's Fiesta Bowl defensive MVP. "So it's great to show that we should have been conference champs. A lot of things didn't go our way. We're better than our record shows."
© 2005 Associated Press