Utah 45, UNLV 23

Utah comes up with another big win over one of the worst teams in the nation. Poor UNLV. They are 1-7 and they don't look like they will be able to win a game anytime soon. This was a pretty good game for the Utes. Ratliff had a great game going 19-23 for 268 yards and throwing three touchdown passes. The bad news is the Utes scored all of their points in the 2nd and 3rd quarters. That means that they obviously didn't play terribly well in the first and fourth quarters. Brent Casteel also had a pretty good game. He caught 3 touchdown passes but easily could have had three more. He was caught twice inside the 1-yard line and also caught a lateral pass on a punt return and returned it for a score - which was called back because it was ruled an illegal forward pass.

This was a pretty fun game for myself as well. Near the beginning of the second quarter a friend that I know in promotions came and got us to see if we wanted to be involved in some promotional things. We did and then got to go down onto the field to watch the game. We watched most of the second quarter from about the 15 yard line before two of the guys that I came down with got to cheer on an animated racecar and whichever car wins - the person cheering for that car got $50 in gas cards. I was supposed to kick a field goal at halftime for a chance to win $1000. That didn't actually pan out - and maybe I'll get to do something different in one of the next two home games.

We convinced them to let us stay on the field through halftime and for most of the third quarter before some guy came and kicked us out. We played catch on the sidelines and had a great time watching the Utes score 31 points right in front of us. After we were told to remove ourselves from the sidelines, I went up to watch the rest of the game in a suite. After the field-goal mix-up, they gave me suite tickets to make up for it. It was pretty cool also, free food, drinks, game guides, awesome seats. Too bad the fourth quarter was an awful display of Utah football. I don't care that they were up by 30-40 points. They still need to play football. UNLV had not given up but Utah had.

Now the utes are 5-4 and need to beat either CSU, Air Force or BYU to become bowl eligible. Maybe they should beat all three...