EL PASO, Texas — The coaches who come to Utah coach Kyle Whittingham to glean pearls of bowl-preparation wisdom must leave unsatisfied. Whittingham, who has won six of seven bowl games, insists there are none to be had.
“I don’t think we have any magic practice formula or routine that is markedly better than anybody else,” Whittingham said. “It’s the way our players approach it.”
Including Whittingham’s 6-1 record, Utah has won nine of its past 10, a streak that began in 1999 when Ron McBride (Urban Meyer’s predecessor) coached the Utes and Whittingham was his defensive coordinator. Utah’s bowl success, highlighted by BCS bowl wins over Pittsburgh and Alabama, stands in contrast to the postseason desert that Georgia Tech has wandered. The Yellow Jackets, Utah’s opponent in Saturday’s Sun Bowl, have lost their past six bowl games, three under coach Paul Johnson.
Utah offensive coordinator Norm Chow, who accepted the job of head coach at Hawaii last week but will coach in the Sun Bowl, has coached at BYU, USC, UCLA and N.C. State, and he confirms Whittingham’s assertion. But he also gives his boss credit for keeping his players’ focused during bowl preparation.
The routine is “not different than most places, but there is an emphasis on [working hard],” Chow said. “We meet; we work hard; we practice hard.”
Offensive tackle Tony Bergstrom sees a coach who is committed to a routine and doesn’t deviate.
“There’s this mystical force out there called “the Process,’ and Coach Whitt will follow that thing to a ‘T’ until he’s dead,” Bergstrom said. “That will never change. The Process never changes.”
What is the Process?
“It’s just what we do every day,” said Bergstrom, an All-Pac-12 lineman and chemical-engineering major. “It’s whatever the voice tells Coach Whitt to do.”
Part of the method is to treat bowl games no differently than the regular season. In fact, the intensity of practices can ramp up in pre-bowl practices, as the team might only have three practices in a week’s time, allowing for a higher pace.
“We go out just like we do during the regular season,” Whittingham said. “We run the gassers, we do all the same things, as far as routine, we do in the regular season.”
Whittingham does allow to having what he called a “bowl preparation model” that has been tweaked over the years. Meyer has had an influence, as has TCU coach Gary Patterson, a friend of Whittingham’s who is 7-4 in bowl games. If there’s anything approaching a secret, it’s how he monitors the workload, being careful not to string together multiple practices in full pads. He has shortened practices to about an hour and 45 minutes compared with the previous norm of about two hours and 15 minutes.
“That’s probably the biggest lesson I think we’ve learned over the course of the years, is knowing when to back off,” he said.
A byproduct of the Utes’ bowl victories — they had won nine in a row before getting hammered by Boise State in last season’s Las Vegas Bowl — is that they’ve motivated players to protect the legacy.
“There are a lot of guys who have worked really hard to put us on that bowl streak,” Bergstrom said. “Last year, that was a little setback. I think it’s our job to start that streak again. It’s kind of on us.”
Bergstrom was a freshman on the team that registered the Utes’ most noteworthy bowl win, smashing No. 4 Alabama in the 2009 Sugar Bowl by a 31-17 score to finish 13-0.
“The biggest thing was just showing them that we belonged out there,” Bergstrom said.
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