Utah’s Morgan Scalley finally gets his turn. It’s been a long time coming

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It’s been a long, tumultuous offseason filled with upheaval, controversy and high expectations, and Thursday night, after all the buildup, the University of Utah Reality Show-football team will begin the 2026 season with a game against … Idaho.

Idaho?

The Vandals are members of the FCS division of college football — formerly known as Division 1-AA.

Is this any way for a team with a preseason national ranking to begin the season? Yes, it is. Only 13 of 136 FBS schools will NOT play an FCS opponent this season (last season it was 10). BYU will play Utah Tech Saturday night. Consider this the equivalent of the NFL’s exhibition season.

The NCAA should’ve banned this scheduling practice years ago, or at least stipulated that no team with an FCS opponent on its schedule would be considered for the College Football Playoff. That would be the end of it. Coaches and media constantly refer to the strength-of-schedule metric to compare teams, and yet the long-standing practice of playing FCS opponents continues.

Anyway, as mismatches go, this is a doozy. Utah returns several key players from a team that won 11 games last season and finished 14th in the national rankings. Idaho wasn’t even a good FCS team a year ago (4-8). The Vandals did give Cal Poly all it could handle last week, though.

For the first time since 2005, the Utes will start the season with a new head coach. Utah has been a model of stability — only four head coaches in 37 years in a profession where the average tenure is about 3½ years (and that includes only a two-year stay by Urban Meyer).

Morgan Scalley, who was informally and then formally deemed the heir apparent to Kyle Whittingham years ago, finally gets his turn. It’s been a long time coming.

Scalley, who grew up about 3 miles from the Utah campus, has been a fixture at the school since 2001, first as a player and then, beginning in 2006, as a coach. He climbed the career ladder from there — administrative assistant, graduate assistant, safeties coach, recruiting coordinator, special teams coordinator, defensive coordinator and now head coach.

The changing of the guard presumably will solve many of the problems that beset the staff last year — dissent in the ranks about how things were being done. It certainly didn’t help that the university had formally named Scalley the “Coach in Waiting” before the start of the 2024 season, creating an awkward (at best) situation for everyone on the staff but especially Scalley and Whittingham. Things soured last year.

Whittingham took the head coaching job at Michigan, but the split from Utah is still beset with drama, including recent accusations by Utah players that they had been forced to play while injured. Whittingham and the university issued firm denials.

Scalley and Whittingham had a falling out, but they have many similarities. Both graduated from Utah high schools. Both have their roots in the defensive side of the game. Both were voted conference defensive players of the year by their respective conferences. Both were strictly defensive assistant coaches and both had served as defensive coordinators for 10 years when they were promoted to the head coach job. Both served as assistant coaches at Utah for almost exactly the same time (Whittingham 21 years, Scalley 20). Both were about the same age when they were named head coach — Whittingham 45, Scalley 46.

They also both had difficult acts to follow. When Whittingham took over as head coach, Urban Meyer had just led the Utes to an unbeaten season. When Scalley took over, Whittingham had won a school-record 177 games, taken Utah to two Rose Bowls and one Sugar Bowl, and finished in the top 25 of the national rankings 10 times.

The changing of the guard, along with the expectations created by last season’s 11-2 record, have made this one of the most highly anticipated seasons at Utah in years. The Utes return the quarterback duo of Devon Dampier and Byrd Ficklin and leading rusher Wayshawn Parker. The only real concern is the graduation of all five members of the offensive line, including two who were taken in the first round of the NFL draft.

Given the fact that Utah moved on from the all-time winningest coach in school history, one that was coming off an 11-win season, clearly puts the pressure on Scalley as he begins his first season as Utah’s head coach.

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