California, Utah, Miami, and Florida State go under the lights… and into the shadows of 2004

This Saturday in college football, it’s impossible to avoid noticing how the nighttime schedule has been shaped.

On the surface, it is exactly as it should be: In the featured ABC game at 8:07 Eastern time, Miami and Florida State — the schools who created college football’s most important game from 1987 through the 2004 Orange Bowl — will get the familiar primetime treatment.

California and Utah — two schools which have occasionally poked their heads into the national spotlight, but have generally remained to the side of the stage over the long march of time — will start their game after 10 p.m. Eastern, and will very possibly kick off on ESPNEWS.

No, Miami-FSU should not have been moved to 10 p.m. on ESPNEWS, but California-Utah darn sure deserved to be the 8:07 featured game, with Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit on the call. It’s just another week in the Pac-12, though, where the passion for the pigskin product undeniably fails to match the other regions of the country where the sport is taken more seriously. The UCLA-Arizona game, which occupied the ABC slot just after 8 p.m. a few weeks ago, was a clear ratings disappointment.  The name of the game is ratings, and since Cal and Utah aren’t proven needle-movers, one can understand why ESPN/ABC wants to feature Hurricanes-Seminoles…

… even though the game has ceased to be the college football season-shaper it almost always was for a period of nearly 20 years.

California and Utah might be the only two unbeaten teams left in the Pac-12, making their game the biggest of the week in college football. However, even while the lights will be bright in Salt Lake City for a late-night fight of considerable consequence, these Pac-12 teams will stand in the shadows… of Miami-FSU, and of 2004 as well.

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It’s all a little bit of history repeating for the Golden Bears and the Utes, all while Miami and Florida State — as a rivalry — try to rekindle flames that haven’t burned very brightly in 11 years.

In 2004, Miami and Florida State did two things in particular: First, they met in the Orange Bowl game. No one could have known it at the time, but this remains — over a decade later — the last time Miami has played in a Bowl Championship Series (now New Year’s Six) contest.

The other thing Miami and FSU did in 2004 is that they both competed in the ACC, following Miami’s move from the Big East. The 2004 Orange Bowl game was Miami’s last as a member of the Big East. When the 2004 season started, John Swofford and all other ACC honchos were hoping for a long and glorious run of Cane-and-Nole clashes for higher-than-high stakes. The ACC Championship Game, created in 2005, was supposed to be the Miami-FSU Invitational.

It didn’t happen.

Miami — though not quite as consistent as Florida State in the 17-season period from 1987 through 2003 — won more national titles than the Seminoles and every other program in that stretch, with four. Florida State won two. Nebraska was second with three. Miami won with such machine-cranked regularity that the idea of an abrupt leveling-off period was hard to envision.

Yet, that’s what college football received.

On the eve of this 2015 renewal of Canes-Noles, Miami has still won zero ACC Coastal Division titles. Cast aside ACC titles; the Canes haven’t been able to win their own division a single time. Florida State, under Jimbo Fisher, has certainly done its part to regain the heavyweight identity the ACC expected it to display on an annual basis. Miami, though, has set back the rivalry to a considerable degree.

2004’s first night marked the last time a Miami-Florida State game truly mattered on a larger scale.

This leads us back to Cal and Utah, and the other side of 2004 in college football history.

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In 2004, Urban Meyer inserted himself into the center of a major (national) college football conversation. However, this was not at Florida or Ohio State. Meyer’s superstardom has emerged in full over the past decade, but the main foundation on which that superstardom was built was established in 2004. Meyer — in just his second season on the job in Salt Lake City — led Utah to an unbeaten campaign, capped by a Fiesta Bowl blowout of Pittsburgh. (It still rankles, many years later, that Utah and Auburn were not able to play in the Sugar Bowl, but hey, that’s how bad the BCS was for college football. I digress…)

Meyer fixed the Bowling Green program in two seasons, but when he polished the Utes in a top-tier team in the same amount of time, Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley (who has since plucked another coach from the Mountain West with encouraging early returns) took notice. Meyer took his career to the next level, and Utah sent a message to the rest of the nation that it could play with the big boys.

In subsequent years under Meyer’s successor, Kyle Whittingham, Utah hasn’t been a relentlessly powerful force. The Utes have struggled — primarily on the offensive side of the ball — but when their offense does click within the context of a single season, they can be supremely formidable.

What happened in 2004 was — at least to a point — replicated in 2008. Brian Johnson didn’t have the NFL-level capabilities of Alex Smith at quarterback, but he was the leader the Utah offense needed. The Utes once again ran the table, and this time they did play an SEC team in the Sugar Bowl (just not the SEC champion). By the time the Utes had finished off a major butt-kicking of Alabama in New Orleans, they had made the case that they deserved to play for the national title. The BCS, of course (there we go again…), didn’t give them the chance.

The team Utah deserved to play for the 2008 crystal ball? Florida, coached by one Urban Meyer.

After the 2008 season — the one which stands out on Kyle Whittingham’s resume — Utah has labored in the valley of obscurity, as Travis Wilson and other quarterbacks have failed to live up to the standard set by Smith and matched by Johnson four years later. This year, however, a 62-20 demolition of Oregon — complete with a trick-play touchdown when already leading by more than 20 points — has established the idea in people’s minds that a big Utah season might be in the works again. Florida State might be the much bigger brand name, but Utah is the team which has accomplished more to date than any other in college football. The Utes might not be playing in the prime ABC slot, but they are the No. 1 team in the sport through five weeks, for anyone who’s been paying attention.

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There’s still one other connection to make to 2004. It involves Utah’s opponent this Saturday night.

See the photo attached to this piece? That young man in a Cal jersey and a cap, riding a wave of happy Golden Bear fans, is Aaron Rodgers. He was the trigger man for coach Jeff Tedford’s offense in the 2004 regular season, when Cal lost only one time — to USC, in a wrenching defeat from which (one could argue) the program has never truly recovered.

(If you disagree with that claim, which is perfectly fair, the Golden Bears truly did not recover from the 2007 defeat at the hands of Oregon State, due to late-game mismanagement from Tedford. If 2004 USC didn’t finish off Cal in the Tedford era, the 2006 USC loss and the 2007 Oregon State debacle truly brought that era to a sad and searing conclusion.)

In 2004, when Utah made a name for itself, Cal — locked outside the Rose Bowl game since 1959 — was trying to make its own climb into the history books and the imaginations of its fans. It’s true that this year’s Cal team might not be ready to ascend to the throne in the Pac-12, but it has to be said that in Jared Goff, the Golden Bears certainly have their best quarterback since Rodgers. They have just as certainly arrived at their most fruitful and hopeful moment as a program since the 2007 Oregon State game went south. Being one of only two unbeaten teams in a Power 5 conference confers, in itself, a certain level of stature on a program, even if said program hasn’t been able to stay in the limelight very long. Moreover, even if Cal loses this game, it knows it will get its chances against Stanford and Oregon to win the Pac-12 North… perhaps earning a rematch with the Utes in Santa Clara later this year.

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2004 — it was a year for Miami and Florida State. It was also a year in which California and Utah made national statements.

Over a decade later, these four teams return to the spotlight, sharing the nighttime in the middle of October.

Will the results of these games serve as a springboard to something special for the winners? Will a narrow loss accelerate a downward spiral, or lead to renewed confidence for the road ahead? Will a blowout loss shake the loser into a state of heightened awareness, or lead to a depression which will linger for weeks, at great cost?

Miami, Florida State, California, Utah — four programs play under the lights this Saturday night. They also stand in the shadows of the 2004 college football season. For every team other than the regularly successful Seminoles, Saturday marks a time when a return to the past is an extremely attractive notion, conjuring memories which are aching to be reborn in the present tense.

About Matt Zemek

Editor, @TrojansWire | CFB writer since 2001 |

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