Utah Utes head coach Kyle Whittingham and his program will enter the 2025 regular season unranked in the Associated Press and coaches top 25 polls. Christopher Creveling-Imagn Images

Utah Utes rank among Yahoo Sports' preseason top 25 teams

Originally posted on Utah Utes on SI | By Cole Forsman | Last updated Aug 16, 2025 2:30 PM ET

The college football world is divided over Utah's stance in the landscape heading into the 2025 regular season.

The Utes won't be ranked in either preseason poll from the Associated Press and the coaches for their season opener against UCLA on Aug. 30, ending a lengthy streak of appearances in the media's preseason top 25 rankings and adding more fuel to the fire for a team coming off a 5-7 finish to 2024.

While not everyone has bought into the hype surrounding Utah's additions on offense, a few of the sport's most prominent personalities and analysts are bullish on the Utes' revamped look with new starting quarterback Devon Dampier and offensive coordinator Jason Beck.

Yahoo Sports is among the major outlets that view the Utes as a top 25 team entering the season; Utah checks in at No. 14 on the website's preseason rankings released Friday.

"Simply having a competent offense could make the Utes playoff contenders," Yahoo Sports wrote. "The defense has allowed fewer than 23 points per game in each of the last six full seasons and brings back three of its four leading tacklers along with DE Logan Fano."

Utah, which comes off a season in which it finished outside the top 100 teams in scoring offense, hopes the implementation of Beck's spread offense and the addition of Dampier make the Utes more dynamic on that side of the ball in 2025. But that'll partly hinge on whether Dampier, a dual-threat signal-caller who led the Mountain West in points responsible for (188) and total yards (3,934) last season, adapts his style of play to keep up with the athleticism and speed the Big 12 boasts across the board.

If the junior from Arizona stifles power conference defenses in a similar manner and brings his turnover count in the process, Utah will be much harder to slow down in comparison to last season, when it had to rotate in several quarterbacks and deal with inconsistencies across the board.

Though the majority of AP voters don't have a high level of confidence in the Utes going into the regular season, a few media members turned in ballots with Utah placed in the top 25. On3 analyst Brett McMurphy, Fox Sports commentator Joel Klatt and The Athletic senior writer Ralph Russo — formerly the head of the AP Top 25 poll — were a few of the prominent figures in the college football community who believed the Utes were deserving of a top 25 spot.